XCOM At Me Bro

It doesn't seem like XCOM should have been so positively received as it was on release. What kind of gamer epileptic fitting over the latest First Person Pew Pew would ever buy a half turn based strategy – half management sim? I'm going to guess nostalgia was a major factor in it’s popularity. The thirst of all us early 80s/90s gamers drooling over the good old days: when games were deeper and rather more intricate affairs when it came to the mechanical complexities on offer. I suppose we only have to look at the massive success of Obsidian’s Project Eternity Kick Starter in order to observe the power of nostalgia, but I digress.

There's a 51% chance that I can hit this Muton at point blank range. There's a 100% chance that 'Kingpin' Kaans from South Africa here is a completely useless git.

Anyway, on the topic of mechanical complexity: Enemy Unknown is definitely a thinking man’s game. Firaxis flex their design acumen by slightly re-imagining the classical systems of Time Units and base building while still retaining the original’s essence: a nail bitingly intense tactical think’em up. Though as much as I praise them for simplifying the mechanics in circumstances that make absolute sense, XCOM can feel like a slightly empty shell from time to time. I understand the core mechanics went through several major changes and iterations over the course of development, as Lead Jake Solomon has mentioned in several interviews and panels. It’s my belief that this lengthy process entirely paid off. But in terms of content there is something missing.

The start of the campaign is a rather hectic experience. As XCOM commander you constantly have the pressure of juggling an influx of engineering schematics, base building and excavating, ground breaking research projects, satellite coverage and squad equips all while being constantly terrorized by an increasingly powerful pool of enemies, while a council of shadowy figures are breathing down your neck. All while being incredibly short on lunch money. It is likely that you’ll lose multiple veterans and important council nations early on (I've lost the mighty profitable U.S.A every game) and you’ll generally hate life and curse the multiverse for a time. This is what I’d expect XCOM to feel like for the vast majority of playtime, however there comes a point in time where organizing my cute cross-sectioned lair and the people inside it becomes a bland affair, a time where I find myself constantly scanning the geoscape; BEGGING aliens to eviscerate me. There’s a point where the tough decisions of where to direct my time and resources evaporate and I find myself simply cruising through the invasion while every now and again a deadly new enemy type will bump the plateauing difficulty curve ever so slightly. I suppose it has to come eventually, but it seems to arrive too soon. Before you know it you’re swimming in scientists, engineers and money and you don’t know what to do with it all besides…say, excavate all the way down to the base of the earth’s mantle.

More, more, MORE is not necessarily the answer, but it’s a good start. Let me research more obscure alien technology. Take the alien surgical equipment you often come back with from UFO missions for example. Currently all you can do with it is sell it. Why not have some research benefit to it that further upgrades your medkits, adds a minor healing ability to advanced armors or decreases time spent in the infirmary? Add more to the currently short list of benefits you can research at the officer training school. For example, allow high ranking soldiers to be assigned to training duty to bring less inexperienced squaddies more up to speed. Balance it by having the trainer and the trainees unavailable for missions for a week or so and by limiting what rank they can be promoted to. Maybe even just lengthening research and build times would ruffle players some more through added tension and serious consideration before committing to a project. Autopsies are carried out way too fast as it is, making South America’s ‘We Have Ways’ bonus a fairly undesirable nab which subsequently means I leave Brazil and Argentina to rely on their amazing Salsa/Samba dancing to hypnotize the X-Rays into submission. (Hint: It doesn't end well for that continent. Ever.)

Certain fan made offerings of the familiar XCOM formula have shown just how in depth the strategy layer of the game could be. Multiple XCOM bases, micromanaging squad equipment down to the number of magazines and grenades they can hold, not to mention how many individual rifle mags, napalm tanks, rockets or what have you you’d like to manufacture. Without the finer details for the player to tweak, I feel Firaxis needed to add a few more layers to the strategic depth of the management layer to keep things interesting.

The Open Source, fan-made XCOM equivalent UFO:AI allows for comprehensive squad customisation, down to what items are attached to their belt or crammed in their backpack.

There’s also an apparently large amount of level variations on offer, which I don’t deny, but I have come across the same spaces quite a few times. Unfortunately many of the UFO crash/landing missions are just not as fun to play in as the urban spaces. Larger UFOs in particular are quite daunting to approach. Not because they look particularly menacing but because they often involve many levels, large ramps where it’s impossible to take cover and all sorts of oddly angled walls and items that make line of sight very hard to judge. A lot of time is spent in these levels trying to frustratingly track down the last few enemies, leading you to divide your squad up out of desperation only for your lone sniper to bump noses with a berserker and two elite mutons literally spooning in an extreme corner of the map. It also seems like a bit of a missed opportunity that there aren't at least some culturally themed levels. No oriental looking temples in Asia or shanty towns in Brazil/Africa. I hope that doesn't come off too culturally presumptuous. I just feel like I'm in topsy turvy world when I'm assaulting a Ponderosa steakhouse equivalent in Nigeria. Then again aliens that impregnate you with their offspring through your mouth before eviscerating you from the inside have invaded, so who am I to say what’s weird.

I feel there are some missed opportunities when it comes to the little details too, specifically with regards to the base commanding part of the game. Like how if I have multiple laboratories stacked next to each other (as is encouraged by the game for research benefits) they all very obviously look the same while each of them have scientists standing in the exact same spots with the exact same animations. Soldiers in the barracks are always either on a treadmill or sitting at the bar, I never get to see them bonding over that pool table in the mess room or grabbing some shut-eye. Hell why not have a shooting range where they can blow off some steam? Better yet, every once in a while have one of them visit the memorial as they sit and remember the fallen. You've made me care about my little comrades this much Firaxis, why not go that extra little step? I know what you’re thinking, small complaints and there are better things to spend time on I suppose. But a self-entitled wannabe-dev can dream.

I suppose I should go face that Ethereal now. Shit.

Death - The Architect of Passage

After power scrolling through the updates of my twitter crushes I came across an apparently aged article written by Christian McCrea, a previous games tutor of mine. As he states himself, McCrea weaves in and out of ideas a little too haphazardly for me to fully understand the broad stroke of his argument, but there were pockets of thought enclosed that triggered something within me, enough to want to form my own musings on similar subjects he mentioned. His paper can be read here.

The primary sticking point for me was McCrea’s statement on how we ‘gain pleasure from bodily exhibition, not dissimilar to a waxwork museum’. I am not entirely sure if this is something the minority experience, perhaps most viewers and players do; but there seems to be a morbid fascination and even beauty to the end-state of a life. Why else are we so bedazzled by flying limbs and corpses pushed to or from their physical extremities after an explosion or a shotgun blast? Maybe it is a fascination with dance like movements as rag dolls somersault and spin through the air, or perhaps it’s the wonder of what someone looks like when they are shot and slam against a wall, or maybe we just like to admire any kind of airborne object. Maybe it’s all three? When the main draw of this medium is its interactivity, then the process of how a user chooses to play and eventually ends a life is one of the most empowering moments within the matrix. The entire process of an in-game kill is influenced by a player, from what weapon we use, where we place the bullet/explosive and if one is perceptive enough, what kind of environmental feature the enemy will land on for maximum artistic effect. I am tempted to call the entire process itself an art, more so in a similar respect to how a traceur effortlessly glides across a cityscape. In a way, a player who has mastered the mechanics and ‘feel’ of a game reflects this artistic flow and mastery of system and self as he plays.


“The body, animated and otherwise, is the concentration point of game materiality – where the senses are interfacing most often, and where most of the production system is oriented. In cases where these bodies disappear soon after death, an evaporation of visible labour occurs.”

McCrea rightfully states the importance of the animated and ‘lifeless’ game body when we interact with it and here I’d like to briefly point out their importance. A distinct peculiarity and personal annoyance I find in some games is the abnormality of the disappearing dead body. Perfectly understandable from a technical standpoint and I know why it is sometimes necessary, but in certain games the visceral reality you've allowed your mind to immerse itself within comes crumbling down under such circumstances. As McCrea states: 

“Bodies left by the player are not murder victims, but our symbolic architecture of passage, leaving place where space once stood. In each game text, if we are to speak of specificity, a different context of memorialisation through the corpse’s lack of animation is true in each game, and in each gameplay.”

Dead bodies in a game area are an integral part of the world’s architecture as much as if the level was to stand on its own as an art piece. I'm not trying to say that the inside of a digital Vatican littered with bloody bodies is ‘art’, that is not the point I am trying to make by any means. But dead bodies left behind by a player are an important sense of passage, of how the player has chosen to touch upon the world. This is what the medium is all about. When a player blasts through a corridor leaving a trail of dead bodies only to turn back and observe that they have faded away, forgotten and abandoned by the system; that is to deny the essence of a character’s actions and of sense of place and purpose. It’s to deny Max Payne’s relentless path of vengeance, Bill and Zoe’s last desperate push for survival through a sea of zombies or the intensity of Adam Jensen’s attempt to save a crash landed friend from an onslaught. Important decisions had to be made and intense moments had by the player in all these circumstances. The game had better damn well of remembered that.

You see the bad-assery that unfolded here? Those 3 unconscious heavily armed guards?Yeah no it wasn't New Years. THAT WAS ME. These bodies, this image, tell a several hundred word story that one would scantly believe had it been a sterile corridor.

The more a game does to remember player choice, the more gratifying the player’s passage through space and narrative. For this reason I congratulate Rockstar on their ever-improving Euphoria Tech. When animation is one of the primary hurdles to immersion in an otherwise spectacularly and believably crafted vision, the reactivity of NPCs clenching their abdomens in pain or the writhing of near-corpses after being shot indiscriminately in the scrotum, is the saving grace of the virtual reality. If you must, take away my inanimate clumps of polygons off screen. But know that you lessen this player's experience when you do.

From Dust till Lawn

The following was a one page review I was required to write for a Quality Assurance job application I did a few months ago. I haven't heard anything back since, but no matter. After recently replaying the game momentarily I re-read this review and still agreed with everything I had previously written. Thought it was worth posting after a month of inactivity. Voila.

A review of Eric Chahi’s and Ubisoft Montpellier’s ‘From Dust’

‘God games’ are few and far between these days and it seemed like From Dust would satiate that craving for creationism. However building houses and amenities for your dedicated followers and cultivating their existences is not what this game is about, despite the expectancies the likes of Black & White and Populous may have predisposed us to.

Essentially From Dust is a puzzle game where the main tool for solving the problems presented to the player is a rather advanced environment physics simulator. The player controls an aptly named omniscient being called ‘The Breath’. Appropriately named since the world is slowly and subtlety altered by you, rather than instantly and profoundly shaken by a single mouse click. Every world’s overarching objective is to populate a number of totems on the map which then opens a portal to the next world. Sounds like a simple objective, but one that is difficult to attain when the unforgiving forces of Gaia are unleashed upon you.

You have the freedom to terraform the world however you please in order to protect your tribesmen and guide them to the objectives. Earth, water, lava and other peculiar plants can be manipulated as you please. However there often isn’t as much freedom in how you solve the numerous hurdles the game presents. The game largely expects you to solve its puzzles the way it wants you to solve them. The lack of lateral thinking required is disappointing. Despite how often pre-determined the answers to the puzzles feel, the levels are designed superbly in a way that subtly conveys to the player the recommended solution. For example: dry, rocky river beds near flowing water often hints that you should redirect the water flow towards them.

Nature is unpredictable and it is entirely possible for your carefully crafted stream to suddenly turn into a rushing river, perhaps unexpectedly drowning your poor tribesmen. Some thought definitely has to be put into how you change the environment, as the slightest misplacement of earth could end up changing the landscape entirely. Taking earth from one spot may reveal a water source that can start a rushing river thereby changing the landscape and the nature of the problem you were trying to solve completely. It is in moments like this where From Dust can be the most fun, when you are forced to think and react quickly with the resources available to avoid Mother Nature’s wrath.

For a game about the beauty and merciless nature of the environment, From Dust is suitably pretty. Watching a dusty desert spring to life with rolling grass, palms and wildlife is so immensely satisfying. It is just unfortunate there is no equally profound change in how the game is actually played when this happens (besides unlocking a new tribal ‘memory’ i.e. a paragraph of story flavored text). Though I can accept the game’s focus is that of its environmental physics system, some sort of deeper establishment between the player and the actual ecosystems you have created would add another interesting aspect to the game rather than simply shifting elements around. The same routine of claiming totems and entering portals every level also gets stale. But at least the methods to which you succeed towards these objectives are varied enough in every world to keep the game interesting.

That said From Dust knows its strengths and where its focus lies. What it does focus on, its superb landscaping simulation, is immensely satisfying to sculpt with. Whether you’re playing purely to answer the ‘what if’ scenarios you conjure in your mind or if you’re trying to guide your tribesmen to salvation, From Dust is a triumph in logical puzzle solving through environmental simulation. 

A History of ViolEnc3

E3 has come and gone and left us with a trail of assorted shooters, shootem-ups and shooteries. You know what Spiderman used to say: With great shooters comes great amounts of copious violence (something along those lines); and it is in this scape of never ending bloody releases that I wish that phrase was closer to what Spiderman actually said. That is: With great shooters comes great responsibility. I wish devs would cling on to words akin to this as if their own dying uncles were laying in their arms exhaling a final addendum to a history of good, fatherly, gamey advice such as: ‘Don’t put an un-skippable cut scene right after a frequently reloaded checkpoint’ and ‘Quick time events are bad’. Mind you none of these loudly complained about ideas seem to permeate through the apparently thick walls of many design meetings.

Call me a new-age indie hippy gamer, I don’t care. But I feel like we’ve been rinsing and repeating the same formula since 1992. When I glance over a few pages of comments left behind by our dearest youth after watching a Far Cry 3 E3 demo on Gametrailers, I die just a little bit on the inside. “GOTY!”, “Ubisoft is the best!!1”, “This is one of the bst things ive evr seen.” These comments make me sad and all this commotion for what? Because we can run around a titillating tropical island, stab people from under water, approach an objective stealthily but then have the effort it took to sneak around not even matter because two minutes later a scripted event will trigger a manhunt on you anyway, oh and now you can chain together knife kills. I am all for anything that adds to the diversity of a typical shooter experience, from what I have seen Far Cry 3 implements these new systems and more rather well. In fact I will more than likely have a blast playing it. I know what you’re thinking reader, ‘So what’s the deal idiot? Why are you complaining?’

I want to be challenged by the encroaching prospect of death in a game; whether it is me at the end of another’s shotgun, someone at the end of my shotgun or the end of another’s shotgun being forced into the face of another poor sod. I do not mean the challenge of whoever has the quickest reaction time to pull the trigger. I mean the challenge of having to handle the weight of responsibility and the consequences of my actions or inaction. ‘Consequences’ is a heavily loaded word thrown around at many a press conference and interview alike; and usually the end product does not superbly represent the profoundness or complexity of what was promised. Bioshock would be an elementary example of the whole ‘choices and consequences’ mantra. Choosing to kill or free a little sister is hardly the deep choice the game makes it out to be. The results are purely physical – numerical; the after effects of your game shattering decisions being extra resources or fewer resources followed by a binary good or evil finale.

The Deus Ex games are great examples of profound consequences through player actions and choices; down to the most minute and seemingly unimportant decisions the player makes. For example: You and your brother Paul are under attack in an apartment room. Paul tells you to leave out the back window so you can escape unharmed, he doesn’t leave you any other options. What the game doesn’t tell you and what many players do out of pure empathy for Paul, is that you can stick around and fight it out with him until you are eventually captured. Both situations will result in your capture, but leaving the apartment means your brother will die alone to a sea of enemy agents. Battling it out with him means he will actually survive; which the player only finds out an hour later into the game. Paul will then continue to be a reoccurring character throughout the game. The player’s decision to fight or flight in the face of Paul’s death is crucial to the evolving narrative. It’s situations like this, where there is profound consequence, which I wish had more precedence in shooters these days. After all what makes games such a unique medium is the opportunity to weave mini narratives for ourselves or affect broader strokes of the story.

It seems the only game at the show that dared to differ from the normal sea of somewhat senseless violence was Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. What was shown during the gameplay presentation was hopeful. It appears to be an action-adventure much in the same vein of Uncharted, albeit a more tense and gradual experience. What I found most impressive was that the enemies the protagonist and his young sidekick were disposing of were not just blank slate baddies simply present for our murderous enjoyment. These ragged men were quite clearly individuals driven to desperation given the post-apocalyptic setting and it showed; through their facial expressions, their actions and especially through their voice acting. These men are so intent on killing you, yet when put in life compromising situations they showed more human emotion than any NPC I had ever seen in a game. When using one as a human shield he suddenly beckons the player to be calm: ‘take it easy, take it easy’. But the end of the demo was most striking when a smothering competition turns against the AI opponent. He starts pleading for his life: 'NO DON'T! -' but not before he receives a prompt load of shotgun pellets to the face.

I wonder what would happen in the final build if I were to let that last enemy live. I’m going to assume if I did he would simply start swinging at me again as you walk off, but I hope I’m pleasantly proven wrong. I hope there is either a benefit or ramification for letting that guy go after he tried to strangle you to death. Even if their isn’t though, it is still refreshing and wonderful to know that the AI at the end of my iron sights has been crafted with the depth and emotion of a human; that he fears death just as much as I do as a player and as a living entity. What I saw in that demo was a breath of fresh air and hopefully representative of how all of the AI (or the humans at least) will react and behave in encounters, hopefully with some personal accountability thrown in there as well.

A Bastion of Style Over Substance

Kid isn’t sure how he should start his next blog post on his own 2 bit website. Doesn’t wanna start it off like a typical IGN article, thinks imitating the game’s narrator is creative.

Kid struggles to find a Segway. But it’s okay, no squirts’ll be reading this for a while.

It’s easy to see Bastion’s presentation through its narrator to be a pretentious affair. A sultry, subtle southern voice that’s maybe been forced out a little too deep for the voice actors liking. Rucks is his name, in Bastion that is. He’s grating sometimes, but his vocal omnipresence never becomes a strain on the convexities.  Its more what he says that is pleasing to hear rather than what he sounds like, at least from the viewpoint of an intrigued gamer such as myself.

Pretentious I said, but so unique and charming that it doesn’t even matter. Rucks is a  brilliant way to present character and setting exposition when there are no characters to speak to, no texts to read. Unlike Dragon Age for example, admittedly a much deeper universe that is littered with thousands of words in codex entries and character dialogue that attempts to explain the physicality of the world. It’s hard to escape the grasp of forced exposition, but in a game such as Dragon Age it is to be expected. Conversely, Bastion is refreshing in how it allows you to maintain the action while soaking in the deeper meaning of on-screen events and the substance of the world.

This is no passive voice that bludgeons you repeatedly with random and obvious factoids either, well… maybe sometimes. But Rucks is so active in telling his story to the detail. Perhaps I decided to use one weapon or ability over another, perhaps I fell over the edge of the level one too many times, or maybe I like to eviscerate every piece of interactive object in a level. Rucks will tell it like it is depending on whatever it is you do. In my thought process it almost acts like a reward. ‘Thank you game, for allowing me to use the shotgun instead of the bow; but thank you also for acknowledging my play style with your sultry man voice.’ As a result no matter how repetitive the action can become sometimes, there is always Rucks to provide something different, something extra. I actually want to play the extra-curricular challenge rooms (or ‘proving grounds’) because I know he’ll have something interesting to say and then some. Whether it’s about the history of the place or to comment on the Kid’s perseverance.

Whether the narrator as a character himself has any non-linear sway over the actual events or ending of the game, I’m not sure of yet. In Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, the narrator is the player and the prince himself; but he knows the eventuality of the story. On the other hand take The Stanley Parable, where the narrator’s hand is forced by the player’s actions whether the player decides to be obedient or not. I haven’t completed the game yet, so it’s unclear to me whether Rucks has good intentions or autonomy over the plot. We’ll see.

Bastion’s style oozes from its narration, but more so from its art direction and music. It is a world with no shortage of extravagant colours and cluttered mess. As the player, The Kid, traverses along pathways, the space beyond him is unknowable; but not for long. Tiles and set pieces fall into place around him as he pushes onward, ever so faithful he must be that a pathway will actually reveal itself to him from the stratosphere. It is so unlike anything I’ve ever laid eyes upon before. It has the color palette and the feel of an overly high fantasy setting, yet looks nothing like your typical fantasy setting. The music totally follows this trend, mixing and blending middle-eastern with western acoustics and synths. Utterly unique.

Utterly unique probably isn’t what you would describe Bastions gameplay systems. This is in no way a terrible thing though. The combat is perhaps best compared with Diablo or any similar action-RPG. There is a decent selection of weapons, all unique from each other and some with alternate fires. Melee or ranged or even both, take your pick; you’ll find yourself amidst different groups of enemies wishing you had a different load out while at other times you’ll pat yourself on the back. There is no ‘wrong’ way to play. A shield adds defensive capabilities and timing your blocks just right will counter your enemy’s attacks, especially satisfying to pull off in the midst of chaotic combat. A fairly vast selection of special abilities, upgrades and even halo-like ‘skulls’ are all available to flavor the action.

Annoyances are minor compared to the overall experience but make themselves known very often, especially on PC. You’ll find yourself trying to balance on extremely narrow paths with one misstep leading to death on either side. Walking diagonally and accurately on a plank is not easy on a keyboard and is a clumsy elementary experience. Additionally the ground beneath you often likes to conveniently collapse as much as it likes to conveniently appear. It’s great for adding tension and challenge, but there were a couple of times where I’d be stuck on an isolated tile whilst being attacked by a floating enemy, leading to repeated death with almost no escape. It’d be nice if the Kid could respawn on the main landmass not three centimeters away. Occasionally the Kid will fall into the abyss below when you could have sworn he was quite clearly on solid ground or just skirting it.  

That’s all for now. I hope to finish the game soon and update the blog with another entry. Moving houses doesn’t allow for a lot of game time.

Mass Effect: Warped Space & Everyone’s a Husk

This piece was written over the course of a month since I was preoccupied with other events for a long time, hence why I refer to Mass Effect 3 as yet to be released to then referring to it as a released title. Apologies!

Mass Effect 3 comes out in a couple of weeks, so naturally I thought I would reacquaint myself with the universe and start a new Shepard from the original game on PC. Also with me in a foreign country away from my original Xbox Shepard I thought I might as well just re roll a new character in preparation for Shepard’s grand finale.

Playing Mass Effect on its release in 2007 I definitely remember being completely enamored with it, but I was a jaded seventeen year old gamer with no real sense or insight into design (because I’m so totally indie now, totes ma goats). This is much akin to how maybe somewhere, somehow, for whatever dreadful reason all the planets of the universe aligned and a virgin gamer in a Rio favela inserts a Kane & Lynch disc into their Xbox. “THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVER” he exclaims as he struggles with a stiffly moving camera and a multitude of abhorrently implemented game systems.

Mass Effect is a badly designed game. There I said it. Perhaps I’m being too harsh but its design on a player feedback level and most of its mechanics are an assorted flavor of mediocre and broken. This revelation shocks even me as I type this sentence; despite how much I immensely enjoy Mass Effect as a whole and as an experience; as I reflect on my latest 23 hour play through there’s no dodging it.

An action-RPG is a genre Mass Effect would be shelved under if you were so inclined to categorise it. There are two systems of play in that designation that define this game: The manner in which you can dispose of your enemies and the manner in which you can role play your character; both fundamental pillars that crumble beneath a fantastically crafted universe.

I suppose I’ll start with the action. You can tell Bioware attempted to make the cover system “intuitive” by simply having Shepard run up to a wall or barrier and lock himself into place. Unfortunately it simply doesn’t work. You have to approach the cover at a very picky angle (usually approaching it perfectly perpendicular works). Once you are in cover Shepard glides across cover as if he were a ballerina practicing his pointes against a glass wall, at a turtles pace with no urgency. Yeah never mind the flying bullets, you perfect that crouched crab walk behind cover Shepard. Of course there’s barely any use for the cover system, because enemies will rarely do anything other than charge at you guns blazing and hands flailing. “Have you ever fought an asari commando unit before?” A snide question one of the games boss characters proudly asks as she sends her commandos after me. Do they utilize the clever tactic of running up to ones face and shooting them at point blank? Yes? Well in that case, affirmative, I have fought the likes of your commandos many times before. Only these tools are sexily dressed blue aliens and have more shields than most other enemy characters. Close combat becomes an eventuality but Shepard sucks at hand to hand and despite all that ballet practice he moves with the dexterity of a cow. Fighting krogan in an enclosed space is a nightmare. They like to charge you for massive damage but Shepard can’t dodge or delay an opponent. All he can do is run away or strafe sideways and prick an enemy with his elbow. It is not an effective strategy or fighting method.

Having a less than average combat system tends to sour a lot (if not all) of the quests. Though mediocre combat doesn’t excuse the quite frankly badly thought out and poorly designed missions. One particular mission stands out the most. Shepard is tasked with destroying a virtual intelligence that has gone rogue in a human lunar base. This basically involves entering three identical looking buildings spaced fifty meters away from each other, killing some mechs and then walking into a specific room in each building and repeatedly shooting maybe 5 ‘VI conduits’ that each take about six shotgun blasts to kill. Standing in the centre of a room shooting several inanimate objects over and over is NOT fun. There were a few times where I was rendered inanimate several times myself via a mech’s rocket to my face as I entered the buildings. This promptly spawned me outside the entrance to the base (thank god I played this on PC, virtually no load times!). The only problem being when you’re outside standing in the middle of three IDENTICAL buildings it’s hard to figure out which ones I had already entered and which one I was supposed to enter. So at one stage I spent literally 8 minutes walking into the wrong buildings before finding the one I was supposed to be in, only to die from a rocket again and repeat the same process.

Speaking of identical level design, this trend permeates practically all the off-world side quests. For example: the same underground bunker consisting of a starting room, a connecting corridor which then leads to a larger enemy/crate filled room, followed by two other connecting corridors that both lead to smaller storage rooms that the objective usually inhabits; you’re bound to come across this space at least five times when doing side quests. At one stage I walked into one of these storage rooms I just mentioned only to find… NOTHING IN IT! (Cue Flanders ‘nothing at all! Nothing at all!’). I stood in this room in mild disbelief. Why on earth is this room here? It serves absolutely no purpose. The reality is the designers literally just copied and pasted this level template onto this world and couldn’t even bother populating the room with some miscellaneous objects to make it feel like a believable space, or even delete the BSP or block off the door that leads to the room. I suppose in real life we can accept a room being empty for the sake of being empty. An empty room in a game just seems to scream laziness. Either the developer doesn’t want us to be in there, or they’re just too lazy to make anything of it. As players engrossed in a world we expect our need for discovery to be satiated, not to walk into be a room and be told inadvertently to ‘piss off, there’s nothing for you here’.

Thankfully this repetitive use of space isn’t emulated in prominent locations and main quest missions. But these main locales have a specific and somewhat similar problem of their own, a term I suppose I’ll coin as the inefficient use of space. It’s easy enough to tell that many of these levels were meant to appropriate a feeling of grandeur and wonder, but Bioware goes about this in the wrong way in Mass Effect 1. It feels like in order to make places feel big… they’ve literally made them needlessly large by placing super long corridors and walkways everywhere. So walking from place to place takes much longer than it really should and all these areas look bare from the lack of decorative and filler assets. I’m sure the fast travel system on the Citadel was implemented after they had realized how inconvenient navigating the city was.

My last major complaint isn’t as big of an issue as the previous ones and perhaps I was unfair earlier in stating that the role playing portion of the game was a mess. In truth the series as a whole is a masterpiece of role playing and in my opinion a quintessential example of it. I strongly disagree however with the railroading of Shepard towards either Renegade or Paragon in the first two games. I’m either an easy going, understanding commander or a harsh and impatient prude. It is rare that I get the opportunity to play the middle ground. Especially when I am encouraged to play towards being a polar opposite by being rewarded paragon and renegade points for my actions. By the end game it’s practically impossible to make some renegade decisions because I simply don’t have enough arsehole points. I’m the type of player who likes to act harsh sometimes. Perhaps if as a player, I feel frustrated or if I think my character in a certain situation should feel frustrated. In Mass Effect 1 it’s once a nice guy, always a nice guy.

I suppose I could go even further into ripping this game apart. How the combat is outrageously unbalanced and cumbersome, or how the UI sucks. But truth be told I don’t want to. Bioware has addressed all these issues in subsequent games in what must have been a very valuable series of lessons learnt. Hell I certainly learnt a lot/had things compounded about design by just replaying the game five years later with fresh eyes. By Mass Effect 3 though, they truly conquered what they set out to make after all the faults of the previous games and it shows. What I want to say finally is that ultimately the universe Mass Effect 1 begins to untwine is so engrossing and grandeur it is impossible to not be overwhelmed by what has been created. The aliens you meet, friendships you forge, the impactful decisions you often make and the revelations you eventually ascertain, it all leads to such wondrous possibilities for whatever is to come next in Shepard’s (and indeed the fabric of our galaxy’s) story. Consider that the entire series of events takes place in only one galaxy out of the billions that exist. The Mass Effect universe is overwhelming. Despite how incredibly frustrating and daunting fighting through the game is, you can’t quit without learning the unknowns of the galaxy. Heavily narrative driven games like Mass Effect are more than the sum of their parts and it is in instances like this where a mediocre gameplay experience can be overshadowed by a marvelous storytelling and pure creative genius. Kudos.

Glorious Free Demos

Just a few quick write ups on some upcoming games the developers so kindly took the time to make demos for. Of course it may be a little unfair to judge a game on a tiny snippet of gameplay but hey, the Duke demo was appalling and reflected exactly how horrible that ‘completed’ disaster was. So there’s got to be some truth to these things.

The Darkness II

First striking thing about the second Darkness is its art style. Gone are the drab greys of New Yoik from the foist game, though admittedly the way the first game was envisioned; that often complained about colour scheme; actually fit the games ambience. Instead our eyes are greeted with a lovely cel-shaded touch that isn’t so bold as to turn it into an obvious hyperbolic statement that THIS GAME IS BASED ON A COMIC BOOK, but subtle enough in its characters defined outlines and rich colours to pay suitable homage to the original paperbacks. We’re talking a very suitable toned down Borderlands/XIII style here.

As far as I can tell the new developers have stayed faithful to the original’s gameplay. Unfortunately this includes the tedious breaking of the light fixtures. Much like Sam Fisher of Splinter Cell fame, Jackie Estacado in this game prefers the darkness to the light very much so (whoda thunk it) and lets just say New York has no shortage of light fixtures. This means in order to stay alive and be able to use your tentacle wielding powers you’ll have to be constantly shooting or whipping out lights as you progress through a level. It breaks up the combat in a bad way and is tedious to say the least. It’s almost like trying to play one of those really bad stealth missions they’d put in FPS’s in years of old. Only this time there isn’t a SMIDGEN of stealth design in this game because enemies will always be shooting at you so you sit there thinking to yourself WHY AM I KILLING LIGHTS AND NOT PEOPLE TEN METRES AWAY FROM ME.I think I got my point across. I’m not sure if there already is, but perhaps some kind of power in the talent tree could be unlocked that would allow you to break lights in a certain vicinity (like an area of effect spell) whilst still allowing you to dismember and shoot people on the move. Just a thought. Speaking of which…

I was disturbed at first when I wasn’t able to eat the hearts of my fallen foes, but pleasantly surprised that I got to unlock that ability as part of a tech tree of sorts. Jackie collects glorious numerical experience this time around and the more disturbing your kills the more you get. These points can be used to purchase new abilities and upgrades, seemingly allowing the player to tailor their gameplay style via whichever path they’d like to follow on the tree. The ease of picking up and throwing objects and the ability to direct your darkness arm slashes are also welcome additions, allowing for solutions to simple environmental puzzles (like having to slash down on electrical wires to open doors) and more variety in kills (like slashing upwards to suspend a foe in midair). Gameplay is certainly more visceral and faster than the first game. Enemies die quicker and you can interrupt the heart eating animation so you can gobble them up on the run (both these points run contrary to the original). One other annoyance is eating hearts, picking up weapons and reloading are all keyed to the same button. I understand the button constrains of a controller but come on now devs, you really gotta think more about these context sensitive buttons. Every enemy that has a heart has a weapon. Having to hunt for the text on screen to find out what I’m actually doing every time I walk up to a corpse is not ideal. This is a shooter, not a text adventure.


Jagged Alliance: Back in Action

I’ve never played a JA game before, only hearing about the old ones here and there and the new one recently. Reading the game synopsis gave my e-penor a hard on. An Isometric tactical strategy of sorts

where I’m:

Tasked with freeing the island from the dictator’s iron grip, players will command rebel and mercenary forces while using tactical, diplomatic and economic tools to keep troops supplied and ready for the next flight, all while commanding them directly in nail-biting battles.

Was that use of ‘flight’ instead of ‘fight’ intentional? Oh you whacky Europeans. Anyway…

Great! It sounds like it has the complexity of a small scale total war game plus it has a combat planning system reminiscent of the original Rainbow 6 games. I suppose the XCOM games are a suitable comparison.

The tutorial was straight forward enough though the constant diving into the inventory and switching items in and out was tedious. Perhaps that’s not as noticeable when you play a full-fledged mission? I didn’t really play long enough to find out. In the demo mission I was plopped into an environment with no real direction and an overwhelming screen of red markers pointing out every single bad guy on the map. This game lacks a fog of war which doesn’t entirely make any sense. It’s almost impossible to tell whether an enemy has line of sight on you and whether you have line of sight on them. I ordered my mercenaries to crouch towards what I thought was a large boulder that would be excellent for cover. As my jungle camoed heroic hired helpers ever so slowly trudged through the nipple high swamp under the majestic Mayan moon light they inexplicably came under fire from the shack up ahead. I was sure I was undetectable given what the game’s visuals had communicated to me. Surely then we would be safe under this large hunk of rock? Nope. Even in a prone position with only their noggins bopping above the waterline my mercs were dying in the equivalent of an apple bopping contest with less teethed mouths and more bullet filled guns. Does this game even have a cover system? If it does it didn’t do a particularly even mediocre job of telling me how safe my men were.

As for any diplomatic or economic action? I didn’t get that far to get a glimpse, I’m not sure the demo even includes it. I am fond of the personality there is to be found in the individuals of your squad. They all have their specialties, unique looks and accents. With dashing call signs like ‘Joker’ and ‘Magic’ to boot. I’m always fond of ways in which you can more emotionally engage a player and I did feel a little bad when Jynx (bless his soul) squirmed in pain from a bullet wound and continued to drown in a swampy cesspool of malaria surrounded by his mates. Tear.


Kingdoms of Amalur

Amalur crept up on me out of nowhere really. I’d seen it on the steam page a couple of times and had skimmed through a few articles about it but really didn’t give it much attention. To be honest I dismissed it as a very derivative fantasy RPG somewhat in league with WoW both aesthetically and mechanically. Also given what I had heard of 38 studio’s founder and former Red Sox pitcher over the years and his infatuation with MMORPGs; I don’t think I was far off.

That’s not to say it’s a terrible complete rip off of a game. On the contrary, I was pleasantly surprised with the demo. Thankfully the MMO influence did not translate to the combat which resembles more of a brawler like say Arkham Asylum or Space Marine. Combat is responsive and quite varied I found as I closed in on multiple enemies whilst firing arrows, dodging their first swings, engulfed them in flames with my enchanted staff, shield blocked their counter attacks and finished them off with a bolt of lightning. All this without having to resort to menus or inventory to swap out any weapons or abilities. It was all just there at the tip of my fingertips, instantaneously without any need to retreat and fiddle with hotkeys. However when you do have to delve into the inventory it’s as clunky as Skyrim’s default UI; Submenus galore and spatially challenged lists for the tens of items in your invisible rucksack.

One thing that stood out the most was the variety and quality of the voice acting and dialogue. It baffles me that Amalur; which I’d wager has just as many NPCs as Skyrim; has so much differentiation and character to each of it’s inhabitants no matter how insignificant they may be. I suppose having an award winning author and comic book writer doesn’t hurt. The majority of dialogue choices with these NPCs though are all the same. You can ask everyone about the exact same subject and usually not much else unless they’re distinguished characters, so replies often consist of the same repeated information but voiced and worded differently.

From the approximate 45 minutes I played Amalur seems like a solid title. It’s obvious a lot of work went into creating its characters and its lore, it’s just a shame that everything about it feels so generic. I’ll definitely give the full game a go when it drops in price.