I Am.

Darksiders, the rebound.

I missed Darksiders the first time around and picked it up on a whim during a Steam sale. Where it then promptly sat on my hard drive for months waiting to be launched for the first time.

If you look at the elements it should have been something I was all over. War, rider of the apocalypse, shows up and rips the earth to shreds only to find he’s far too early his siblings are nowhere to be seen and it’s not actually the apocalypse. The powers that be are displeased and his protestations that he was summoned go unheeded.

It’s a frame job and he rode right into it Claymore at the ready.

 

Cue a massive depowering and being shackled to a shadow entity who has you on a short leash, voiced by Mark Hamill who plays it as the Joker but without the cackling, and away you go.

My problems with the game came from the fact it’s the cliché depowering plot mechanic again. You play Metroid, they take your abilities away in the first level. In God Of War you dragged Kratos carcass through ancient Greece to  become the God of War and then they depower you at the beginning of God Of War 2.

The list goes on and on and it always struck me as lazy game design. In Darksiders you start as War, you then spend the rest of the game trying to unlock abilities to get back to being War. Net result to me is damn all progress.

The targeting system is awkward, I can’t lock on to fast moving flying enemies as smoothly as I’d like and it can drop the lock when the view of an enemy is obscured momentarily, which is something that shouldn’t happen. I know it has walked behind the pillar, let me circle it so I can take the shot.

Then there’s the art style. War is pretty squat looking. So squat looking he looks more like a chunky action figure than a game texture model. And those textures are ridiculously ornate to the level that he looks like he was dressed by Liberace.

Indeed everything is pretty squat and looks like it was dressed by Liberace.

Then there’s the mechanical puzzles and secondary items which have been ripped from The Legend Of Zelda.

And like Zelda it is a collect-a-thon.

And like Zelda it cheats by extending the play time by forcing you to back track.

And like Zelda it’s good.

The last one is what surprised me. It’s good in a way that I wasn’t enjoying it until I had three hours of play time racked up and couldn’t remember exactly when I started enjoying it but now was.

I’m not sure if I’ll enjoy it enough to carry on when the inevitable ‘Now run back and collect all the stuff you could see but couldn’t reach the first time around’ twist occurs but it’s good enough for now.

Dinner for one. The DLC way.

Dinner for one: A game you can finish in one sitting.

There’s lots of dinners for one out there and I quite like them as I'm not a completist. It’s supposed to be entertainment, not ditch digging or some other form of hard work. I think that’s why I drift between new MMOs so regularly, the moment people talk about crafting or ‘getting proper gear’ I instantly start thinking how I could be spending that time playing an entirely different game and not wading through stats and spread sheets.

Asura’s Wrath is a dinner for one. Less of a game and more of an interactive Anime series with an interesting plot, great cut scenes, amazing music and insane actions carried out by a tap of a button during a  Quick Time Event, like when you don’t want to listen to some monologue and would prefer to head butt the speaker in the face while running at him across the surface of the planet at light speed, it’s dinner for one true and true.

The problem I’ve found is that it appears the true ending of this dinner for one is an item of Downloadable Content (DLC) not due to be released until the end of the month. April 24th to be exact. And while I’m used to videogame endings being awful, (No one cares that you didn’t like the ending of Mass Effect 3. Man the fuck up whiner.) there’s something very distasteful about that.

But it’s a trend we’re going to see more of in 2012.

Capcom have put 14 Street Fighter X Tekken DLC characters on the game disc and plan on charging people who buy the game for the unlock code whenever they decide to release it.

Technically this allows people who haven’t bought the DLC to play online against players who have, the character models being on both discs with the DLC buyers being able to choose to play as the locked characters in matches while those who haven’t paid can’t, but between the Asura’s Wrath five episode DLC ending, Street Fighter X Tekken  charging you to unlock parts of what you’ve already bought, Bioware delivering their second take of the ME3 ending as free to download DLC and Square Enix ending Final Fantasy XIII-2 in a DLC pack it’s pretty clear that this is the latest ploy to go after the used game market.

If you want to see how the stories end or if you are a completist you’ll have to hold onto your game discs for months after you finish the game.

I’d say we’re not far away from games not actually shipping in the box but we had that with Ultima Online: The Second Age back in 1998. The retail boxes with the client hit the stores but the server roll out was delayed a few weeks meaning you bought a box with a game they hadn’t made work when they shipped it to retail.

Time of your life.

Having ripped the JRPG to shreds in the last post I thought it was time to focus on something Japanese game developers do much better than Western Devs.

Epic batshit insane eyeball frying spectacle.

Asura’s Wrath plays like one giant Quick Time Event (QTE) but having played the demo I was up off the couch bashing the B button as fast as I could more than once and having a great time doing so.

There was a giant fat guy taunting my character, he threw me around the place and then I was shooting at him while running towards him. Then it was time to tap the A and Y buttons when prompted until I built up enough energy for a finishing move. He then has some Star Destroyer style ship fire missiles at me until I finished that off. More running, shooting and missiles from him until I flung him off the planet into orbit. He then turns into the planet sized giant in the trailer above and I beat the hell out of his finger tip until it turns white hot and he begins to disintegrate.

I still have no idea what the story is but let me tell you my friends that it’s a terrible thing to watch a fat man cry. And I now want the game.

While there’s no replayability in games which overuse QTEs (Press X now to win!) in this case I don’t care too much. A good QTE sequence can be as rewarding as mashing the fire button half a dozen times to knock a health bar down. A bad one of course will kill enjoyment of a game stone cold dead and has led to QTEs in totality being reviled by gamers.

But look at God of War, the boss take downs in that franchise rival anything which ever required shot spamming and dodging for sheer satisfaction.

 

Sega’s Shenmue introduced QTEs as a concept, but it was games in the 70’s and 80’s such as Dragon’s Lair and arcade fighting games which QTE was derived from.

To this day I still suck at both. Dragon’s Lair was a coin sink designed to empty your pockets as rapidly as possible, instadeath and a return to the start screen until you had the reaction sequence down cold was the order of the day. As for fighting games with their complex button sequences for moves, counters, blocks and any other abilities always pushed me away from spending enough time to master them.

I bought BlazBlue Continuum Shift a while back to rectify that situation. Because If you’re going to start it’s best to start at the top and Arc System Works are the 2D fighting game developer of the last decade. Alas the incredibly comprehensive training mode shows you very quickly how steep the hill you’re climbing is. A sequence along the lines of ‘Back, B, Down Left, Up, Y, Up Right, Left Trigger, Jump, Spider Monkey, Kitchen Sink’ done without screwing it up somewhere or pausing a nano second too long between button presses is the key to many victories over a button masher like me.

Since I had no intention of putting in anywhere near the level of work required to developed the muscle memory to chain sequences like that together, it’s not fighting to the better players it’s more akin to playing the notes of a piece of music on an instrument. As such the upper echelons of fighting games will never be for me the same way playing the piano currently isn’t.

Of course Azura’s Wrath is out the same day as Team Yakuza’s Binary Domain which is problematic from a scheduling point of view.

Though two interesting games in the same week is not a bad problem to have.

Your JRPG sucks.

The Old Republic isn’t the only RPG franchise EA is putting it’s weight behind, and while ToR carpet bombed the place with advertising Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning (Shown above) has to make it’s own way in the world as a Single Player Action RPG. It has a marquee team behind it and the word of mouth is good but more than that it’s a single player version of an MMO set in the same Kingdoms Of Amalur setting.

I don’t know if you’ll be able to import your character from Reckoning into the yet to be announced MMO or if they’ll use a Legacy system where your descendent can pick up your collected items as they’re family heirlooms but it has Claudia Black (Stargate SG1, Farscape) narrating it’s teaser clips and that sounds like victory to me.

What with the mix and match combat styles I’ll probably end up playing like Kratos from God Of War. But there’s nothing wrong with that.

The RPG on games consoles has a very chequered history, I sat through a lot of it and enjoyed very little of it. Let me explain.

Before the First Player Shooter (FPS) bestrode the gaming world like a colossus and after arcade and fighting games had their moment in the Sun the Japanese Role Playing Game (JRPG) dominated the blockbuster game segment.

And I couldn’t stand any of them.

It’s okay if you liked and enjoyed them, I just found their emo soaked nonsense plot lines and awful combat systems to be repellent.

Sure there were classics like ChronoTrigger on the SNES, which I enjoyed but by the time I reached Star Ocean: Til the End Of Time on the PS2 I could no longer see why any of these were selling in any great numbers. Not only were the emotional heart strings they were trying to tug the same in every game but they kept the exact same play mechanics introduced decades before.

Strip out the minutes long cut scenes where everyone appeared to have a maudlin feeling to share in agonising detail for the next few paragraphs and to look at them as games they were all simulating the combat experience of a table top RPG, like Dungeons & Dragons. But nothing kills story momentum in a table top game like having to rip yourself out of the plot to roll dice and check various tables to see if you’ve hit them or they’ve hit you.

Now, tri-Ace are probably one the greatest JRPG studios out there but the JRPG conflict resolution formula, like table top RPGS, is nothing but player pain.

Why should I bother with any of that rubbish when we’re on the cusp of a golden age of western RPGs?

We now have Mass Effect. We now have the Elder Scrolls. We now have Fallout. We’ll soon have Kingdoms Of Amalur. And that’s before we even count the massively multiplayer RPGS. 

And while these have been a long time coming I think all of this started back during the FPS expansion days of the Unreals and Quakes of world with a game few played and less missed. I think the modern western RPG didn’t start with Ultima. I think it started with Silver.

 

 

French publisher Infogrames (Who later bought and changed their name to Atari) funded an early attempt to take on the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest franchises. They failed. As at the time it was an incredibly stupid idea since both games generated queues down the street at midnight launches.

But Silver changed combat and item use to a much more quick click affair so everything happened in real time without the need for some game stopping transitions. Even after a port to the WindowsCE friendly Sega Dreamcast, Silver still wasn’t a success as PC gamers were busy playing Deathmatchs and the Dreamcast while a fabulous machine was stuffed full of Sega arcade games for Sega fans. Those Sega fans chose the cutesy Sega developed ‘Skies Of Arcadia’ JRPG, one of a very few RPGs on the system, over the weirdo western real time RPG.

But time has passed now we find that fortunes have been reversed. Skyrim is emptying gamer pockets left and right while the biggest franchise in JRPGs, Final Fantasy, took a very public beating when Final Fantasy XIII was declared to be both vapid & boring by some of the more hard core Final Fantasy fans. 

Things were so bad that tri-Ace were called in to make a save with Final Fantasy XIII-2 and by the looks of things they took the amazing graphics of the White Engine made a few modifications to the combat system and added missing FF-XIII components such as “Plot” and “Characters”. Turning FF-XIII into a real game and not a bunch of confusing cut scenes with pointless gaps in the middle.

 

But you can tell it’s still a bunch of emo nonsense.

I truly am of the belief that JRPGs suck. You might not think the same and that’s fine but thankfully for me these days it doesn’t matter what I think since there are so many successful western RPG franchises now to choose from.

And I’m looking forward to Reckoning.

Thank you motion control. And goodbye.

Having bought all of the current generation consoles, except OnLive which isn’t available in Ireland yet and probably won’t work due to our trailing edge broadband infrastructure, I can say that I’m tired of motion control.

Not because it’s the most physically demanding way to play a video game, which it is, but because it’s implementation ranges from ‘Works okay’ to ‘This is horribly unplayable’.

XBox Kinect tends to fall into the works okay bucket but it’s strength is drunken two player party games where falling over while trying to pull off an action is as entertaining as what’s happening on screen.

Between the on-rails shooters, sports vignettes and dance games there hasn’t been a real forward push in gaming concepts but if you’re into those genres (Yes. Depends on the sport. No.), you can have a good time with Kinect.

The Wii and it’s Wiimote has a whole host of problems but 90% of the time gets the job done. That 10% error margin can be incredibly frustrating if you spend a significant amount of time playing video games. There are times in boss fights where it lets you down at exactly the wrong moment turning a challenge into a frustration, but even then for anything really hard core on the Wii you tend to be using the Wiimote in sideways game pad mode, harkening back to the NES controller days.

Regardless, the Wii’s card has been marked for the past 18 months and motion control is deemphasized in the WiiU with the introduction of the screen in your hand concept. That in itself is not new since you used to be able to hook a GameBoy Advance up to a GameCube and do about a quarter of what they’re now pitching with the WiiU but I’d like to see it used for something that wasn’t forgettable.

The GBA to GC link was used in at least 60 GameCube games only two of which I can remember using it well. Those being Animal Crossing and The Legend Of Zelda: Four Swords. On the topic of Four Swords that could have been Nintendo’s online gaming killer app if they actually understood online gaming. Which they didn’t. It would have been an online version of Gauntlet, but my GameCube Broadband Adapter was used even less than my Playstation 2 Broadband Adapter and that was a US import system which meant I was always playing EverQuest Online Adventures on Pacific Standard Time.

Look at those graphics.–Puke-

Finally we come to motion controls greatest villain. The PlayStation Move. Everything about the Move feels cobbled together. The Eye camera has a small angle of view, the Move itself doesn’t come with a navigation controller meaning you need to use the standard game pad (Awkward to hold in one hand while you have the Move in the other) or buy the Navigation controller separately. Paying tens of euros for a D-Pad, Analogue Stick, two triggers and two buttons. If you want the dock to charge them both at the same time using one cable that costs extra too.

Then you find they’re not even joined up in the user experience. Bring up a Crossbar system menu out of a Move enabled game by hitting the PlayStation button on the Move and you’ll find you can’t use the Move itself to make selections.  All the motion control logic appearing to be designed for in game only use. This is the odd one out when you consider Kinect brings you to a Motion control shell for the XBox while the Wii is completely WiiMote compatible.

And then there’s the games themselves which appear to have inconsistent levels of Move accuracy. The deliciously Grindhouse look of House Of the Dead Overkill: Extended Cut from SEGA works the way I’d expect it to. From across the room I point at something on the screen and can blast it’s head off.

GoldenEye 007: Reloaded on the other hand requires I move many feet closer to the screen as it says it can see the Move controller and the game will stare at the ceiling or down at the floor if I don’t.

I can play both these games on the same system with the same setup and get two completely different results.

All in all motion control has been an interesting distraction at best and an awful burden at worst. But now they need to focus on getting rid of the TV entirely and just start drawing images on our retinas.

Gaming with IMAX sized images. Now that’s immersion.

Carmack building next tech demo.

Or DOOM 4 as it’ll be marketed to us as.

‘Targeting 1080P for next gen consoles brings pixel precision back to relevance. Almost every display screws with 720P.’

https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/149196752573054976

What we’ve learned this year is that Bethesda can’t write code, seen in Skyrim’s exponentially increasing slow down the longer you interact with the game world, and id still can’t write a game with a plot. Or a point.

You’d think Zenimax would introduce both teams to one another over a few drinks and ask if either of them had any questions?

It also looks very much like the Fallout MMO is going to be built with the HeroEngine and not anything from the Zenimax stable of studios. What with Korean development shop NeoWiz licensing Unreal Engine 3 for their fantasy MMO I’ll be interested in seeing if the MMO market remains a segment apart from mainstream game technology or if it’s quickly Borged.

If the future of anti-piracy is that everything runs on a remote server and you just install a client then it’ll be Borged.

Regardless of DOOM 4, Borderlands 2 is out next year.

Hopefully with more dancing Claptraps.

The Old Republic: Battle Damage Report.

With character progression being story driven I’m not going to say too much about Star Wars: The Old Republic beyond giving some early access impressions.

While some animations can be rough and glitchy in places and a lot of the field quests are of the generic MMO type The Old Republic puts it’s monster budget on the screen and out of your speakers.

I wasn’t overly impressed with the HeroEngine when I saw it first, it’s not FrostBite 2 or CryEngine 3, but used in a story telling game it’s perfect. It allows BioWare to turn around story based content very quickly due to it’s multi-user editing tools and it’s functional enough to host all the interactivity the game requires. It’s also bright and colourful enough to render lightsabre, blaster and explosive flashes as well as interesting surroundings. You’ll run into places and take a moment to Mouse look at things as BioWare understand spectacle. If there’s a window, there’s something big to look at out of it. If there’s a drop there’s something to look down into it for. The set piece areas are quite impressive and feel vast. Too vast when you have to run across them, but vast none the less.

What’s also impressive is the dialogue. It’s everywhere. No more clicking on an NPC to open a 5 paragraph block of text which boils down to “Collect 10 things, kill a guy.”, there is a conversation with back story dialogue and I don’t know for sure how much my dialogue choices and resultant actions affect my characters personal story arc. The fact I don’t know is the best part of it. In many other MMOs you really don’t matter and have no real impact on the game world. Typically anything that can happen will happen regardless of if you’re there or not and it’ll reset in a few moments when it does happen so someone else can do it. There are moments in The Old Republic where it feels you’ve made choices which might not affect the game world but will affect your place in it and how it sees you. It’s a somewhat bizarre feeling in an MMO when you know you’re not going to get a do over on an action you take. What if you get screwed later on down the road? Too bad, so sad.

Overall with the servers maxed out even before the doors have been opened, I typically had a 20 minute wait in the queue for access, I think BioWare have a World of Warcraft killing hit on their hands. The issue will be if BioWare will not just keep but grow the number of paying subscribers after the launch day surge to keep the quality up? If they don’t the production costs will probably kill the game dead as I don’t see The Old Republic having a cost model that works in the free to play/micro transaction market. Blizzard’s upcoming counter punch, their own Warcraft killer, Titan, is supposed to ship at the end of 2013, that’s far enough away for BioWare to gnaw away at the Warcraft user base.

There’s only so much money in the subscription MMO segment and right now Warcraft has most of it, that’s down from when it had all of it, but the bottom line is for The Old Republic to live Warcraft must die. The Old Republic will be the most dangerous competitor World of Warcraft has ever faced.

It’ll be interesting to see how this turns out.

Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials is quite good regardless of what Symantec would have you believe.

If you're using a genuine copy of Windows and you're not already paying for a an anti-malware product or if your subscription is up soon this is a great free product and 10x less annoying than more than a few of them you have to pay for.

How to die?

The founder (Well co-founder but he was the only one present so he gets the title from me by default), of the company I work for took his own life on Friday. He was run through with lung cancer and if he wasn't already suffering unbelievable pain it was all he had to look forward to in his remaining few days.

Ridiculously wealthy, married to his first sweetheart and with children and grandchildren in tow I can't see that this was an act of despair. Much more likely he wasn't going to cede control of his own body and in doing this he took back control of his life the only way he could.

I'm Catholic and there are rules about these things, but one thinks we've become so obsessed with living as long as possible we've lost the ability to help people without hope to die comfortably. Instead we leave them to take it upon themselves.

It's a complex and knotty moral issue and one I couldn't attempt to resolve.

Captain America Reborn

I stopped reading Captain America soon after Marvel killed him off. There was no point in reading a book about Steve Rogers without Steve Rogers in it and much as I thought Bucky Barnes was great as the Winter Soldier he quickly became terrible as Captain America.

Having passed on the entire Secret Invasion event I went off to DC land exclusively while Marvel fans hung around to play guess the Skrull. Having read the conclusion of One More Day it should have been clear it didn't matter who was a Skrull as Marvel reserve the right to hit the reset button whenever the mood strikes.

Early last week I started looking at Dark Reign as it occurs to me that Norman Osbourne can be what Tony Stark couldn't be post Civil War. More than just a jackbooted fascist but also a scheming murdering bastard to boot. Emma Frost and Scott Summers are gearing up for a domestic argument which will level cities and this has me reading Uncanny X-Men for the first time in ten years. Finally, they're bringing Captain America back.

All in all as of last week I've swung to reading more Marvel than DC. Green Lantern and GL Corps holding my interest more than anything listed as the Blackest Night space opera unfolds but I've dropped everything else DC after the let down which was Final Crisis.

Now, How they're bringing Cap back troubles me somewhat. You see, Reborn tells us that he never died, even though he was shot, bled out and they buried his depowered corpse in the Arctic. Instead it turns out he was shot with some Dr Doom quantum bullet (Were it fired backward through time I'd suspect the hand of Grant Morrison) which unstuck him from time and he's been bouncing through it ever since.

In the face of such comic logic bullshit I'm pretty glad I hadn't been reading Cap after they killed him off or it would have been two years of a nonsensical waste of time.

We're supposed to believe that instead of just shooting him the Red Skull wanted to just drag him into the future for some purpose which only makes sense to the Red Skull.

I just can't swallow that. They might as well have him just step out of the shower and claim it was all a dream.

But yeah, I'm reading Marvel comics again. With their narrow little universe and small little stories. Who'd have thunk it?