Good and Bad news from the Government on UK game ratings. Mixed feelings here.
Category Archives: Videogames
“videogames” “video games” “digital games” – whatever your term, this broad category means any discussion by me or others on games.
Fallout 3
You become a bit startled going outside for the first time
Fallout 3…oh, Fallout 3. After spending 50 hours in the game according to my save files (thus more since I reloaded sometimes) spread over 5 months (from January to this week), I must say it was quite an adventure. Before I get to some spoilers, let me say the journey is pretty good most of the time, but there were bumps in the road, and like anything else, ups and downs. This is my mini-overview/review/journey 🙂
If you want a screenshot travelogue of the entire game, which man is a lot of screenshots, check here! I’m not going to annotate them like my Deus Ex ones, since there are over 400 of them. 400! This was kind of an attempt to do some kind of log in picture form though, since I didn’t take any other notes.
The Post-apocalypse Never Was So Fun To Explore!
The in-game world is pretty huge
Right off the bat I highly recommend Fallout 3 to those who enjoy exploring. There are amazing things to find, setup by the level designers, artists, writers or programmers. Little gems in the sea of brown that basically is Fallout 3’s main colour pallet. Among these are the contrasting forest Harold area, the classic 50’s black and white inspired and entirely too spooky Tranquility Lane, as well as very interestingly recreated Washington areas. The radio is well used, although could have used more songs, and perfectly fits exploring the world 😀
The start of the game also is a nice sandbox – for learning about the world, sorting your character in a rather nice in-character way, and doing some nice exploration of a small areas. Jumping through your life’s early major events is perfectly suited to vault life too.
I did enjoy many quests, although they were all pretty basic and morality was either “kill or save” all the time. The exploration was pushed on by far-reaching quests set over a massive area, although fast travel helped enormously. You can find some nice unique items by exploring, some which are nice to just come across.
VATs Combat
The combat was amazingly over the top. Lasers, chainsaws, limbs flying everywhere, slow motion galore. Even on hard, I never really found it difficult (although I did set my companions to “never totally die” so I didn’t have to micromanage quicksaves). I should have used more of my big guns I guess, I rarely used the mini-nuke launcher, which is a pretty fun weapon. Tying the combat in with some okay, but not brilliant, lockpicking and hacking exercises gives fits and bursts of action on top of slower exploration. VAT’s was, I think, a good thing overall – but a better real time combat system for the obvious amount of time you run out of VAT’s points would have been good. I felt that just having the fastest weapon (my laser rifle or pistol or combat shotgun) was necessary for ever finishing a fight.
A Tragedy of Many Errors
All characters still look pretty…dead
There were some worse off parts about the game however. The actual RPG dialogues and choices are mind-numbingly bad – not necessarily in voice acting (which is much improved since Oblivions horrendous 6 voice actors situation), but the actual dialogue the player gets to choose from, and the few choices they get are usually “Good”, “Evil” and “Kill Everything Totally Evil”. There were a few quests which did warrant somewhat more careful choices – the android quest (finding an android who wiped it’s own memory for a foreigner – you can capture him/kill him, or get the foreigner to go away or kill the foreigner) I recall, had a good few ways to do the various outcomes (although doing it the most straightforward good way was a net loss for rewards when I rechecked the Fallout 3 wiki, sigh).
None of these were ever dilemmas though, something I thought would come more to the fore. In fact, one quest I didn’t bother to play through, partially because I knew the ending and wasn’t interested in the quest anyway, was the Tenpenny Tower Ghouls. This was where a set of ghouls wanted into a nicely defended, human-only tower. The quest had three options: ignore it (my choice), let the ghouls in, or kill the ghouls. Letting them in had the ghouls eventually just kill all the humans, and killing the human-like talking ghouls wiped them out. It was not a morale dilemma, just a rather silly point of “The ghouls were actually evil”, since no one in the tower particularly was evil. The only way this part of the game could have made sense is if there were other morale dilemmas and dodgy choices available in the game – where people were not clear-cut good and evil. There are only rare cases of this however. No, the Megaton wasn’t one of these, that was an entirely comical choice at best, and warrants no real discussion 🙁
So, the choice is there, but not exactly very inspiring sets of choices. Luckily most of the fun is not in the deep dialogue and plot paths, but in the exploration.
My choice of companion: the only woman, Star Paladin Cross
Companions and AI also, sadly, were not a strong point. Companions were basically gun-holders. Dogmeat was cool, but a dog is a dog, and he didn’t really do much. The various different AI enemies were pretty bland, beelining for you or finding cover (sometimes) – at least they fought pretty competently when they weren’t trying to shoot their guns through terrain, and did explode nicely when needed. I wish the companions did more then just repeat the same canned lines (which get boring fast), and have their own quest lines, but never mind. A missed opportunity to be sure!
Tranquility Lane, good random plot mission
Finally, the plot itself – started reasonably okay (and had interesting points), if terribly fridge-logic based (why did your Father leave without you? why kill himself? urg…), however never really bonds the player to the tasks they are assigned at all – especially after your already distant father kills himself. With no real option to do anything but follow the plot markers around, well, apart from some interesting missions inserted into the general plot for no real reason, it’s a letdown (although much, much more of an improvement over the ghastly short and very boring Oblivion plot). The one bit which annoyed me, and I never got told this, but Eden being a computer – this really was very underused. A real shame, I thought he was quite funny even if the actual ways you could convince him he was wrong in his very short conversation with you were bizarre and rather silly. The Enclave never really had a good “enemy” to relate to, the Colonel you never really saw much of, or knew much about sadly.
A Horrible End to a Otherwise Fun Journey
The “Boss” who we barely know…
The “choice” and ending laid bare…
We die, hooray! 🙁
Fallout 3, well, as I’ve seen complaints elsewhere, let me agree – the ending is a tad on the letdown side. There is nothing near the quality of Storm of Zehir‘s ending (which was fully narrated, included every major sidequest outcome and even allowed you to re-pick what happened to get every ending!), but instead, once you do a ridiculously easy fight you push a few buttons and die. Yep, die. No choice in the matter, even if you’re a 10-intelligence, maxed-out-science prodigy genius like myself. Nope, I have to shoot then sacrifice myself. How fun.
Woo, way to stop the game in it’s tracks, especially if you have lots of unfinished business. Luckily I had been told, and read about this, so while I didn’t know the specifics of the plot, I knew I had to do sidequests before starting the last quest. The designers even realised their error and brought out downloadable content to “fix” this – by saying the player was merely knocked out and woke up 2 weeks later. A shame the actual ending just wasn’t up to the rest of the game, like I said, so disappointing overall, to me an absolutely horrible ending. You never knew what actually happened to those places you saved, helped, burned to the ground or blew up.
To Sum Up…
First view outside the vault, come on, you know you want to go looking…
There was a reason I put off the ending for 3 months (since I ended most of my quests in March and played the last bit recently), and it is obvious I disliked it. I ran out of general quests to do really, and once you reach level 20, killing more things just gets “in your way” – the combat, after 50 hours of it, can’t get much more repetitive of course!
However, the mix of item-finding, exploration of large areas and all the little touches in design, history, backstory and world feel, this is worth playing. You can always avoid quests that are boring, and work on doing other things. The non-combat choices might be limited, however I still had fun finding new things, and certainly exploring the mythology of the world pre- and post-apocalypse. It’s a crazy Science! world, and all the more fun for it.
SYNSO2: Squid Yes, Not So Octopus 2: Squid Harder
Robert Fearon (his blog, Mersey Remakes) has done a second follow up to War Twat (which I enjoyed), called Squid Yes, Not So Octopus: Squid Harder (which is actually a sequel of SYNSO: Squid Yes, Not So Octopus). I played the beta form and managed 1 minute just about…the full complete (with more stuff!) one should be out v. soon.
A shooter where it starts fast and only gets faster, with options for auto shoot and turning speeds which is much appreciated. The music is funky, the graphics awesome and gorgeous and overwhelming, subliminal messages just as cool as War Twat, top notch short fun 🙂
Screenshots do not justify it but here is one to tempt you:
Just a note: doesn’t do badly at full screen on a widescreen monitor, but sometimes windowed is easier to control – since up/down movement then is the same speed as left/right movement. 😀
Videogame Nation
The Urbis Gallery opened the Videogame Nation exhibit two weeks ago – I was invited by the curator, David Crookes, to go along. I meant to get up something about this before, but my camera died (these are it’s last pictures) when I broke it accidentally.
The exhibit is based around the UK videogame industry from past to present – there is enough for a good few hours, if not more, looking at the exhibits, playing the games on show, and reading the huge amount of information on a whole range of aspects – from playing to making videogames.
An entire bus stop, yep
I personally loved it – some great games on display (apart from the arcade cabinets all free to play), design documents and a varied amount of information on different magazines, publishers, developers and people. The games are presented in a variety of forms – including some nice football bench seating for Sensible Soccer, and a bus stop and bus seat backs for portable games (okay, that was more odd then great, hehe).
N64 lunchtimes!
I added a few things to the places you could write and draw – I’ve got pictures of my additions to the wall of consoles (sadly missing out several older consoles, but still allows you to pick one and put a comment up), and my Half Life “crowbar” cover, no doubt by now replaced but, well, a game which deserved a clean classic-like cover 🙂 (it was also easier to draw then any of my other ideas! 😛 ).
The Urbis at night
Half Life cover
There were also some great displays on the mini-controversies in the UK around videogames. For Manchester, the Manchester Cathedral sillyness, with Sony’s response printed in its full glory, in the 18 rated section (where, for some reason, Bully was situation despite not being rated 18…), as well as some on the value of fitness to do with videogames.
Never finished Oliver-twins material
However, the main thing that was great for me was the history side – there is a lot of information about pre-current-generation games, including ones not finished (Dizzy 2, as photographed to the right), the design of many UK titles – Lemmings, Sensible Soccer, Broken Sword (which I still need to play…), Jeff Minter classics, Oliver Twin games and things from the bedroom programming era – including Elite, and more. It is about the only UK exhibit of videogames on right now – so well worth a visit. Check my gallery of pictures to see some of the information boards and pictures of what was available to play – not at all comprehensive, I should have took more picture 🙂
I am also going to try and get back for some of the Sunday-timetabled related events, some sound very interesting 🙂 and if I go I’ll put down what they were like (especially since I’ve not been updating my site much!).
For more pictures I did find Negative Gamer to have some great pictures up, and David has a small Flickr set too 🙂
Mirror’s Edge
The City at Night, rather awesome.
I got Mirror’s Edge for a much more reasonable £15 at Game on Friday, and finished it on Saturday. The game was, I’ll say, about equal measure of fun and frustration. From what other critical looks I’ve seen, that pretty much is the consensus all round. It is also ridiculously short, as a fast-action platformer, if you actually succeed in doing levels well, the game flies by.
The good parts are that it is, at it’s best points, a great moving, great looking game. The first person perspective can really work, and I thoroughly enjoyed leaping around with speed. The runner vision (where you are best going marked in red) generally succeeds, and level layouts are generally well made in this regard – although quite linear most of the time. I also want to point out, the lack of GUI is refreshing – you actively use your hands (to press buttons, turn things as appropriate) which looks and feels awesome.
However, on the other hand, coupled with the short (no, exceedingly short) nature of the game, it suffers when the design is purposely annoying. One major section I spent at least half an hour falling and dying constantly consisted of jumps and actions which were, really, easy to make, just Faith never seemed to grab hold of something. The game strings out the content by making some bits really difficult, and so get used to seeing that same bit again and again if there are not enough save checkpoints.
I’ll also note there is online activation. This isn’t great, although at least it isn’t a “contacting server to make sure you can’t install this”, so I will always, at least, be able to install it. Since it is so hidden though, I do wonder how many installs I get…hmm…
The combat, well, less said the better. By far the worst aspect of the game – and I wish it was impossible (allowing fast speed to instead allow you to dodge with special moves, or incapacitate for a while, or at best knock out with one button press – not a quicktime event!). The various forced fights, well, I gave up on pacifism pretty quickly near the end. The boss fights, were, well, bizarre – a one which was two rounds of hand to hand fighting, two which were a single quicktime event, and another which was against a server room…sigh.
More cutscenes like this in game!
The story was hodgepodge – I didn’t like the flash-like cinematics (looks so drab, and un-pretty!) – I think the game engine was underutilised there. The characters were also very unsympathetic, and it barely made sense (“Wait…what? you’re going to investigate a random security firm just like that?!”), and looks like serious sections of sense were cut from the game. The difference between levels (an excuse to do parkour) and the story (I have to go to this area…why exactly?) is quite strange. I didn’t even get to see the protagonist’s base in first person – interactive cutscenes would have been awesome for the game too, like Half-Life 2 has, since you can see your hands – but never actually pick up and use anything. Still, since you are playing a character, it’s not too bad – although like I said, a missed opportunity to not do it for all the cutscenes. The ending – well, if it even was one, was…just a little clichéd, and also a bit silly (for some reason you’re not shot by dozens of security people). If there is a sequel, there’s not many characters who are left alive out of the very tiny cast, so at least there might be some more interesting people there the future.
The audio also went out of sync on my system for some reason when it came to the speaking parts and cutscenes (I tried with and without vsync and PhysX, meh). This leads on nicely to say that the game also always displays in 16:9 – don’t play this on a square monitor, and my 16:10 monitor always had black bars. This is a downright lazy port, what with my audio issues and the black bars, almost but not quite as bad as Assassins Creed (which was worse because it had the fun “multi layer escape” option, making Alt-F4 faster). It does however at least look amazing, with great visuals (including lots of bloom) and some good sounds (running feels like running!).
Fun disarm moves, if you can pull them off…
How would I improve the gameplay myself? Make the protagonist more prone to doing the “right thing”. Moves are bloody ridiculous to pull off without pre-knowledge of the level layout – especially when you mistime a jump not quite late or early enough. My thinking would be to make it more Assassins Creed-like, where you can hold an “Up action” button and it’ll do a jump at the edge of a building or ledge, and also if there is an available jump while hanging and looking in a certain place – do it automatically (not having to press “up action” then “up action” again to hang on then “up action” again to pull yourself up – holding it down should be enough, and be much more fluid). Also stopping at edges better, so you don’t just fall off, would help – there is no reason why I should be looking at where my feet are in a first person game – my feet should know there is nothing there, and stop walking!
The combat – like I said, remove or drastically improve it. Pacifism would be great (so always having avoidable combat), but failing that the removal of the quicktime gun taking event would be nice – make it always consistently knock out the enemy would be nice. If you are able to get near these gun people, then they should become easy to take down (if you stand still, you would be easy to take down, moving fast though should be another matter). Make sure that the AI also can’t shoot through their friends would also be cool, and adding actual AI so it didn’t just do scripted cover usage (which I saw about once) would be nice. Those melee guys were ridiculous too 🙁 multiple chasing enemies, with tasers, just is frustrating (and rather dumb, since it seems they are the ranged weapon they have, and you can’t disarmt hem in one hit – so you get two people able to hit you, you can’t knock either one out quickly, so you die).
So much to explore outside…if only we could.
Finally, it’d be nice if like Assassins Creed, it was more open world. The tight control is sometimes nice (for setpieces), but mainly frustrating in the game (when trying to figure out “how on earth do I get up there” usually). So many closed doors, and never an opportunity to see what The City is like in the short time – you only ever meet security personnel! The bag angle is also lost almost immediately when the game starts – this would have been great to have as “something to do”, in addition to mission objectives (and also make the other characters in the story have more point to them). At the very least, making all the cutscenes use the game engine, and possibly even be interactive, would be a great plus.
Give Mirror’s Edge a try if you have a chance – borrowing it should be easy, since you can finish it in something like 5 or 6 hours at the most, and give it back the same day! 🙂 I did enjoy the fast parkour bits when they worked for me, so worth trying just for that, and the visuals are a great change of pace too.
See my gallery for a “travelogue”, or playthrough via. screenshots, or click below:
Videogame Movies…Entirely Forgettable
I watched two films on the way back from America a few weeks ago…one was a reasonably okay drama called “A Bunch of Amateurs“, pretty standard plot by my reckoning but good enough to watch. Then there was…some other film. I am pretty sure I watched two anyway…I am sure it was something…had action, must have been action…ummm…
So it went when I returned and tried to remember something I had watched not the previous day.
The film? Max Payne… Continue reading Videogame Movies…Entirely Forgettable
GDC2009 – Friday – My Student Mixer, AI SIG roundtable, Game Preservation and a Cold
Friday – the final day of GDC. In the morning passing over a Larrabee session I visited the career area briefly – loud, busy, and I just noted who was there more then anything.
Later in the morning was the AI SIG Roundtable. There was really not much a chance of discussion on the problems with going forwards with the AI Standards the SIG seems to be built around. I hope that the issues are resolved and information provided or worked on that AiGameDev or the AI Guild themselves wouldn’t do – such as academic relations, looking at listing tons of papers, and so forth. I’m going to keep an eye on it and lurk but I’ve got too many commitments elsewhere to help directly.
I had my own session – the student mixer – just before lunch. I took a few notes – but mainly it was discussing some of the cool things the students present were able to do, how they felt about their course and work (which they are all usually fine with – no doubt the people who come to GDC are that dedicated 🙂 ) and about the IGDA efforts I did a little questioning about if they thought more communication, student groups or possibly in the future a student event would be a good idea – on all counts yes, and I hope to get this going by myself if no one else will help 🙂 – one of the things people dislike is the students have to be integrated into the normal chapter meetings, online resources and groups – segregating it helps immensely, since it would allow people interested in the area to help, but the rest to work on their own things.
During the mixer I finally got to meet Julia Brasil – who is finishing her design/art course soon, and I meant to meet last year. In fact I managed to miss Corvus Elrod who I saw once but had to rush off somewhere else. In any case, we went to the Preservation SIG meeting, then roundtable – lots of notes I have to write up, and a general feeling of some progress, with a lot more to do in the future came out from some of the stories people brought up. In related news to this seeing Devin Monnens article in the print IGDA Journal was awesome.
In the evening there was the AI Dinner, where I got to discuss all sorts of things. Some nice discussion on things with a few fellows from Google, including possibly getting the search term “A*” or “A* search” specially listed as an exception – since it currently just lists all the terms starting with A 🙂 – also discussed some bits and pieces of AI, design of an MMO, and the IGDA a little.
Lastly, throughout the day I got a worse and worse cold. Urg, the final few days of my trip will be pretty basic – I’m writing this on Sunday and, well, I’m not out riding a bike as I had hoped – at least this didn’t hit me early on in the week. *sniff sniff* *achoo*
GDC2009 – Thursday – Meet the Press, QoL and a AI Roundtable
A lot of various things done on Thursday – this year I was looking to see what the IGDA was doing in more depth, especially on the QoL side. Jason Della Rocca is leaving, so they explained in the AGM that there is a process underway to get a new executive director. There was also news on the Leadership event issue – no apology from the person directly involved but at least an apology from the board chair herself at the lax actions of the response and not having any coherent voice, although I think more needs to be done (as did several question askers). The board voting (it being a rather closed process), the board being silent (they’re getting a blog, so a good first step) and other items were also brought up (website revamps, money issues, chapter restructuring). My notes will be up next week.
I also went to the QoL committee roundtable – a lot of issues were raised as being problems to tackle and there is a reasonable action plan underway – as well as changing it to a Special Interest Group so more people can get involved. I’ll report more on this as I get involved.
The morning had the second AI Roundtable – less people (it clashed with another AI session!), but very informative on some subjects. I’ll get notes up next week 🙂
Finally, an area that I keep an eye on is game press – so going to Meet The Game Press panel was interesting. There was some good information on how to promote games – such as how to contact the press – and some of the problems they have too. They didn’t go much into why there wasn’t much journalism done, but it was at least very informative on how the 3 different sites run.
The evening had me visit the speakers party, which was fun (although I missed Simon Carless who I intended to chat to, who was always busy speaking with someone 🙂 ), although I felt a little out of place just doing the lowest of the low student mixer (which I think is important, but I doubt everyone would, hehe 🙂 ).
Max Payne 3
I’m muddling…no Remedy, but hey, more Payne. I’ll just hope for now.
GDC2009 – Wednesday – Anti-Censorship and more
IGDA Luncheon
On Wednesday I intentionally missed the Nintendo keynote, which from checking the news didn’t announce anything interesting. I went to 4 sessions in the day – only 4! It’s utterly bizarre…
In any case, the first one was the Anti-censorship Committee Roundtable, which looked to do a few interesting things this year – a cheat sheet for the ESRB, information for debunking myths and regional grassroots campaigners or people who rally against laws. Some interesting people there I met who do European items too, which wasn’t covered much in the roundtable itself.
The next session on adding LIFE to Saints Row 2 was a big lesson in not giving designers too many things to do. 15,000 or something nodes on the map – slowly added over development, constantly erroring, and whenever art got updated the nodes sometimes were then in terrain. It however did add a good amount of artificial life – another big thing was that the basic things, not the special fire breathing mimes but just the smokers or groups of talkers were the best additions to the world since they are so common.
Lunch was the IGDA VIP Luncheon – it was nice to see some great praise for Jason although there was, sadly (and I should have seen if something was going to be done) no presentation of anything to him, even just a card or something else. A missed opportunity.
After lunch was the censorship roundup – an interesting look at the state of American censorship. Some stuff on countries I’ve not had a chance to check up on either. After this was the first AI roundtable – a great look at a whole range of areas, from multi-core processing to behavioural design to the way to implement things.
We checked out the Expo briefly before the awards, where a lot of the IGF games sadly were turned off (obviously all at some pre-awards thing, annoyingly I guess!). The IGF awards gave me a few titles to check out, the main awards were pretty standard – not much, I think, that really pushed games this year as much as some of the previous years, but at least Tim Schafer was fun 🙂
I actually wrote this writeup of the day there too, I perhaps half wished I had something better to do I guess! Notes for this day will appear when all the others go up too.