Well, Fallout 3 is my personal game-of-the-year leader so far, but there are still a couple titles that could pull off an upset. One of those is Valve’s upcoming Left 4 Dead. The intro sequence published on Friday gives me high hopes.
While the animation style is more realistic than that used in the classic Team Fortress 2 “Meet the Heavy/Soldier/Engineer/Demoman/Scout/Sniper/Sandvich” trailers, there are some similarities, including the slightly exagerated motions of the characters. Of course, the other characteristic it shares with the TF2 videos is that it is must watch.
In continuing an ongoing email conversation with a friend about Fallout 3, it occurred to me that with all of the things that Bethesda Softworks did right, they also did a great job crafting the achievements. The game instills an incredible sense of discovery as you explore different areas of the world, so I have been hesitant to spoil any of that by discussing too many specifics with any of my friends. The achievements actually provide a helpful guide to safe topics of conversation. I don’t know that every quest has an associated achievement, but all of the major ones seem to. So, I can check my friend’s profile and learn which quests I am free to talk about. Now, it’s true someone looking to replay the game might not appreciate you bringing up a different way of approaching mission X, but for the average player it is a beneficial to know that it is safe ground for discussion. As someone diverging from his usual path in accepting any mistakes I might make instead of the usual save-reload cycle, and knowing that there are just too many games out there to allow any possibility that I may play through the game again, I have been ravenous to discuss each encounter in detail to discover what the alternatives might have been.
Milestone achievements at levels 8, 14 and 20 which show whether you’ve chosen to play altruistically, selfishly, or somewhere down the middle, provide another indication of how friends have chosen to play the game. Now, achievements like this piss me off as a completist, but I appreciate the fact that they help to define the play experience of an individual iteration through the game. When talking to my friends about the missions they’ve completed I have some indication about whether they blew up the town or saved every citizen. Or whether their professed fiendish behaviour hasn’t really been all that bad after all. And yes, I’m talking about you Shane.
I have to credit this article from Gamasutra, written by a professional game designer playing through Fallout/Fallout 2, with leading me down this train of thought. I got halfway through writing an email to a friend when the combination of that discussion and the subject of the article compelled me to write this post.
After creating a few smaller addons for myself, I finally built an addon for Warhammer Online that was complete enough to submit to an addon site. It is just a simple addon that will track any custom chat channels you join and leave over the course of a session and automatically rejoin them the next time you log in. It’s surprising that it wasn’t a built-in feature of the game, but it pretty much prevented me from using custom channels very often so it seemed a good candidate for my first real addon. And if you play Warhammer Online, you download ChannelMemory yourself, or add it via the Curse download client.
I have to say that I am impressed with the CurseForge site that Curse has set up to handle addon submissions. Curse has always been one of the top sites for downloading addons, but with the tools available on CurseForge, I expect they will be a top choice for developers. Zero effort bug tracking and project pages with automatic pushes through to the curse portal and the curse download are hard to beat.
Wow, looks like I am on a very effective “one post a month” schedule. Fortunately, I have a reasonable excuse for the most recent absence. I took a short contract putting together the front-end for the Global TV Elections website. With Harper calling a snap election, the turn-around on the first iteration of the site was pretty quick. But, we got it done and I think it looks pretty good. It’ll disappear in a few weeks once the election is over, so it is another notch on the ol’ resume that won’t really be viewable by prospective employers. Of course, I’m not really looking for a position doing front-end web development, so that’s probably not a huge deal.
Work hasn’t been the only thing consuming my time. Aside from a solid session of Rock Band 2 on the weekend with some friends, the bulk of my gaming time has been consumed playing Warhammer Online. This is the first MMO since World of Warcraft to feel so … complete … at launch. And the launch itself went much more smoothly than WoW’s did. I don’t know that it will replace WoW as my MMO of choice, but at least until Wrath of the Lich King comes out, I expect that I will be spending much more time in the Warhammer world than I will in Azeroth.
I also think I’ll finally get around to trying my hand at LUA and making UI addons. In WoW there is already a pretty strong ecosystem but with Warhammer there is a significant demand, but not a lot of product yet.
I haven’t mentioned it on this blog yet, but I am a fairly regular World of Warcraft player. I am a raid leader and our multi-guild group has killed Lady Vashj and we are currently are hitting the three bosses in both Hyjal and Black Temple on a regular basis. Well, not so much regular right now because the summer lull has played havoc with our roster.
But the reason I am posting is because a few weeks ago I started up with a regular Zul’Aman group that was aiming to start farming bear mounts. Now, Zul’aman is a 10-man raid instance aimed max level players with a fair amount of experience. But as a challenge for the very top-end, if you can beat the first four bosses in less than 45 minutes, you can earn a rare Amani War Bear. And after getting close last week, this week the group got it’s first bear. I wasn’t fortunate enough to win the bear this week – only one drops each time you beat the timer – but hopefully this group will stick together for the next 8 weeks until the rest of us all get kitted out.
After a positive experience revisiting an older critical favourite, I thought I would finally dig into ’s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (Konami 1997). Originally released on the Playstation, I purchased the XBLA port last year but got distracted, as often happens, by other games before I had a chance to play. It is, quite possibly, the nadir of the Metroidvania style of game and finally illuminates for me why the term encompasses both Metroid and Castlevania. I had always felt the Metroid games were a more complete example of the mechanics the Metroidvania label is supposed to describe, but I suspect that SOTN – and the earlier Super Metroid for the Super Nintendo – must have been the two titles that originated the label.
I am impressed how the game feels both traditional and fresh. I suspect that the high quality of animation and the huge array of weapons, armor and special items you can collect play a large part in that. I also think that the variety of different endings is fascinating. It is entirely possible to “beat” the game by killing Richter without realizing that there is fully half the game that you haven’t explored and that there is a more . The story and cut scenes are pretty laughable, even for the time at which the game was released, but it is terribly satisfying to put the clues together to unlock the inverted castle and the chance to defeat Dracula. Of course, I wasn’t wise enough for that myself and had the secret inadvertently ruined when my curiosity got the better of me when checking a FAQ to determine the effect of one of the rings I found.
Unlike Psychonauts, which I talked about in an earlier post, it is the mechanical gameplay and level design of SOTN which make it a classic. The controls are spot on, and the variety of weapons and the equipment system as a whole gives you a lot of choices. Certain weapons do more damage to certain types of enemies. Using certain items together will open up brand new attacks or even a new area in the game. On top of the equipment, are raw abilities (like double jump), new magic spells, health and heart power-ups, familiars and even new forms to collect. When you encounter a difficult boss, you generally have the option to backtrack a little bit to find an easier path or some power-ups to soften the boss up a little bit. Sure, SOTN was not the first game to dole out abilities to open previously inaccessible areas of the game – and far from the last – but rarely has it been so effectively implemented. Much like Psychonauts however, there is a lot to be learned about game design here.
Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 (Bizarre Creations) came out this week and I think I’m feeling the addiction even worse this time round because I have a few more names on my friends list. The six different modes are great, but that just gives you five extra games to protect your high scores on. I’ve managed to hold on to the high scores in Kings and Sequence, but even after a hand-crampingly long session this evening I could only manage to get back up to second in the other modes. Now I don’t know what to crack out first when I finally get some friends over, Geometry Wars 2 or Soul Calibur IV. Oh…and there’s still 1942: Joint Strike. And that’s not even accounting for the great games being released over the next month as part of Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade. Or Too Human, which just went gold yesterday and will be hitting shelves in three weeks.
Like most gamers, I’ve got quite the stack of great games that I always intend to get around to playing. And even with a handful of games still in shrinkwrap on the shelf, when the urge hit recently to revisit some old games I downloaded, through Steam, games that I didn’t already have in my collection.
The one that I’ve actually finished is Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts (Doublefine 2005) and it is everything that critics have been talking up for the past three years. The platforming is ultimately mediocre, but you hardly realize that as you play through because the actual design aesthetic is fantastic. The basic conceit is that levels take place within the minds of different characters, which a central real-world hub of the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp. You take one the role of one of the students determined to prove himself and ultimately save his fellow campers.
Each mind is extremely unique and reflects the personality of that character, whether it’s the war-torn mindscape of your drill instructor of the world bending psychosis behind the milkman conspiracy. But the true strength of the game is really just how well realized everything is. Your fellow campers, while being entirely tangential to the plot, betray a surprising amount of individual identity in their brief bits of dialogue. And not only do the various levels serve as an illustration of the host character’s psyche, they are also used to tell various stories, whether it’s someone’s redemption and return from sanity or another’s dark, buried secret that belies their cool, party-girl persona. Psychonauts really demonstrates how an average game can be elevated by exemplary design.. Tim Shafer gave a talk at GDC in 2004 entitled ‘Adventures in Character Design’, where he talks about just how much effort he and his team put into character design and how he accomplished it. It’s a great talk, but I’d suggest playing the game before listening to it.
After a positive experience revisiting an older critical favourite, I actually decided to hop into another classic right away, but I’ll write that up next time or these things will never get posted.
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On a non-gaming related note, I came across a touching photo essay earlier this week and I’ve been debating whether it’s something I want to put in this blog. As this man’s tale of his 97-year father was both elegant and moving and ultimately I was glad that I came across the link, I thought I would provide the the link for others to experience.
Well, ultimately E3 proved to be pretty disappointing. Sure, there were a few demos of some of the more anticipated games this year, but there were fewer surprises than expected. Of course, it will be an even bigger disappointment if I don’t get my XBox 360 back in the next week so I have it in time to play pre-ordered copy of Soul Calibur IV. Fortunately, I did come across a pair of Flash games today that got this week off to a more entertaining start.
The first was the physics based puzzler, Fantastic Contraption, which immediately put me in mind of The Incredible Machine, though I quickly realized the game is less about creating crazed Rube Goldberg-esque guantlets than it is about creating the eponymous contraptions. In the 20 available levels you need to create some kind of device for each that is capable of pulling, carrying or launching a target object from the construction area to the goal area. While you can use each of the 3 wheel types or either of the 2 resizable rod types as much as you like, you are limited by the dimensions of your construction area. You are able to connect rods to each other or to various points of the wheels to enable a variety of different effects. Even better, you can save your more impressive creations so that other people can test drive them. Most of my solutions ended up being pretty ramshackle, but the tank, at right, suggests the potential for creating some advanced vehicles. You can access and rate saved designs from within the game and I would strongly recommend you check out what people have come up with.
The second game I came across today was Bubble Tanks 2, an aquatic shooter. The game takes place in a series of bubbles where you steer your “tank” with the keyboard and shoot with the mouse. It’s a fairly standard Flash shooter, but the ability to upgrade your ship with the bubbles left behind by dead enemies and the fluid controls kept me playing longer than I intended. Making a solid shooter really is all about getting the right feel for the motion and keeping a steady progression of difficulty and Bubble Tanks 2 nails it on both counts.
But what I had really meant to do this evening is get through the last few levels of Psychonauts, which I was finally prompted to play when it was introduced in the Backlog segment of last week’s 1UP FM podcast. Since I finished sending off the first wave of resumes this afternoon, I figured I was due for a bit of a break. Unfortunately, I think I sent one of the resumes out with the wrong cover letter. I have to confess I’m not a fan of some of the job application websites out there that manage to automate the process just enough to lull you into clicking the wrong button at the wrong time. Of course, I have to finish this blog post before I can go do that, so …
Sony has a very clever alternative to the usual Power Points, using Little Big Planet to display all the usual charts, graphics and box art these companies use to brag about how successful they are. I bet the audience was for more attentive this go round than at either of the other press conferences. Ok, I take that back. Tretton is droning on and on about statistics. Hopefully he’s going to get around to some interesting announcements at some point.
zzzzzzzzzzz…
Wow, Jim Lee has some serious MMO cred. It’s tough to get excited about DC Universe yet. The footage doesn’t look that impressive and it’s hard to see how they can preserve the feel of the universe with so many player controlled heroes.
Please don’t tell me that they are showing us testimonials from developers? Where are these games he keeps talking about. Although it is a strange coincedence that I just added the Prince of Persia producer’s blog to my feed reader only to see him talking about how great the PS3 is.
I am supendously underwhelmed. Ok, maybe the God of War 3 trailer will redeem the press conference. Well, maybe if they had showed gameplay. Ok, the Infamous trailer is a little more like it. And now more talking and more rendered gameply. *sigh* I really don’t think that this was the press conference that Sony needed. That was a bit of a letdown
