tempest in a teacup

My opinion of Sonic Unleashed has improved somewhat from my last post, which was made after being made to slog through two consecutive Werehog levels which nearly put me to sleep. I’m at the final stage of the game, so I don’t think my opinion is going to change significantly – I might as well pen down some thoughts.

The regular speed levels are basically a combination of Sonic and the Secret Rings with fixed controls and a rather stripped down version of Sonic Rush. To be honest, I’m pretty satisified with how they turned out, barring a few minor issues that are holdovers from Secret Rings (the game doesn’t like it when you try to backtrack, and manual camera control is basically nonexistent). Even early levels like Apotos have a few alternate routes you can check out (and the key to accessing them is timing-based puzzles, much like in Sonic Adventure 2).

Here are a few things I wanted to note about the speed areas:

• The boost move (done by pressing X on the classic controller) works significantly differently from the similarly-named move from the Sonic Rush series. Here, each button press results in a fixed-length boost, during which you can’t change your direction or stop, meaning it needs to be used judiciously. No more holding X throughout the entire level like in Sonic Rush.
• Unlike just about every other Sonic game made to date (except Secret Rings, getting 100 rings doesn’t net you an extra life. The way lives work in this game is actually kind of similar to Sonic 2006, in that you can’t farm extra lives by replaying levels over and over again. You have 3 tries, and every time you lose one you get dropped at an autosave checkpoint while the timer continues to run (basically meaning that dying during a level run hurts your chance of getting an S-rank). You can get more extra lives from item boxes you find in platforming puzzles located in the hub areas.
• Speaking of hub areas, the Wii version doesn’t have hub levels you can run around in, instead opting for an Ace Attorney-ish point and click interface for exploring the various towns you’ll visit. I like this, if only because it lessens the amount of time you need to spend there. The retarded town missions you had to do in Sonic 2006 are still fresh in my memory.
• There are indeed side-scrolling areas to be found in the speed levels, but they play nothing like any of the sidescrolling levels in the older Sonic games or even in the Sonic Rush games. Just about all loops are scripted, meaning momentum plays basically no role in these sections. I’m not sure what the point of including these sidescrolling sections was if they weren’t going to at least try to apply some elements of 2D design to them.

That said, let’s move on to the Werehog levels.

The actual platforming in these levels is fairly nondescript and unremarkable – I don’t have much to complain about, but I can’t really say I enjoyed these sections either. On the other hand, the combat is just terrible. There really isn’t much strategy involved at all beyond ‘jump to hit enemies in the air’ and ‘make sure to use the roll-dodge if you’re fighting those big guys with the clubs’. Sonic’s main combo move basically consists of pressing X and Y alternately, and his level 2 combo (which you’ll earn by the second or third level that you play) covers a ridiculous amount of area on the ground, making it a very good crowd control move. You can press A at certain points in the combo to get more interesting finishing moves, like an aerial launcher (which is kind of pointless without any sort of aerial followups besides jumping and mashing more buttons) or a ground pound move that’s also great at crowd control.

On top of that, the camera is zoomed out way too far, making it difficult to figure out if my attacks are going to hit anything or not. More often than not I jump to try and tag one of the game’s annoying flying enemies only to whiff entirely. On top of that, I have a sneaking suspicion that the actual attack hitboxes and the effects on the player model don’t actually line up a lot of the time.

Add these facts to the additional fact that there are three times as many Werehog levels as regular Sonic levels (each town has a set of three Werehog levels and a single speed level, along with a bunch of side missions, some of which the game requires you to clear before you can go on to the next area) and we have a rather frustrating package overall. On the one hand the actual speed levels are the most fun I’ve had with a Sonic game in quite a while, but on the other hand the Werehog is mostly bland and uninteresting.

Unfortunately for my wallet, though, I think the game is good enough for me to take a risk on buying the PS3 version when it hits in December. Fingers crossed.

After 3 or so hours of playing, the best thing that I can say about Sonic Unleashed for Wii is that it’s not terrible.

It’s just unrelentingly bland.

No, I don’t really feel like going into detail right now. Maybe tomorrow.

I’ve been getting my ass kicked (with friends) in the first campaign, and I love it. It’s the first real FPS I’ve played that relies on co-op so much, and it does co-op really well.

We reached the finale of the first campaign a few times today, but never managed to hold out until the rescue chopper arrived. A truly ridiculous number of zombies assails you at that point, coupled with numerous boss zombie spawns (at one point we had a Tank, a Boomer and a Smoker all running around). At one point the Tank climbed up to the vantage point where I had been sniping from and basically punched me off the building.

Good times.

And now, it’s time for some screenshots from the full game!

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One of the things I do to pass the time when I’m bored is read the official Team Fortress 2 forums on Steam. A lot of different types of players post there, but the most interesting posts are the ones from the people who play the game competitively. Particularly since when you try to hold TF2 up to competitive standards, it starts to show some flaws.

There are a few issues that tend to come up again and again – I’ll try and go over the most important ones.

Damage Calculation

TF2 is different from a lot of other shooters in that weapons don’t do a fixed amount of damage. Instead, the damage a weapon does is a number within a range. The damage ranges are different depending on the distance between the shooter and the target. For instance, the Scout’s scattergun does 85-105 damage at close range, 10-40 at medium range and 3-10 at long range. In most cases this isn’t an issue, but it is rather an issue for certain characters. One example typically brought up is the Demoman – his sticky bombs have a very wide damage variation (actual numbers can be viewed here). This isn’t an issue for Demomen who use their stickies to trap choke points since they typically use multiple stickies in such a situation. However, at high levels of play Demomen tend to rely on tactics like midair sticky detonation, and this is where the unpredictability of the damage starts to bite. Arguably, medium range direct combat should be the Soldier’s forte rather than the Demoman’s, but I see a lot more Demomen being used in this capacity than Soldiers, probably because they can get similar results without being hobbled by the Soldier’s small clip size and long reload time.

Another argument that also comes up fairly often is that the use of damage ranges rather than fixed numbers also makes the outcomes of fights more unpredictable and lessens the impact of individual skill (a point which comes up fairly often).

Hit Detection

This mainly has to do with hitscan weapons (like pistols and shotguns). Apparently visual indications of damage (like blood) don’t always correspond to actual damage being done. So a Scout who’s hopping around like mad firing his scattergun can see the blood particles, but it doesn’t mean he actually hit him. This, needless to say, is pretty silly. I’ve only seen one thread on the topic (and it’s dropped off the front page of the TF2 forums) so it’s hard to say how common this issue is. I certainly haven’t seen it affect me all that much, with the exception of long-range shotgun blasts and maybe Engineer/Scout pistol spam.

Lag Compensation

This is somewhat related to the point on hit detection. Unlike its predecessors Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament, Valve’s Source engine netcode has extensive lag compensation. In games like UT, the player sees his action execute with a delay that represents the lag he’s experiencing. In other words, if a player clicks his fire button, the game actually fires the weapon only after the server has been notified and has acknowledged this action. Under high-ping situations this results in a noticeable delay for every one of the player’s actions.

The Source engine does away with this by keeping track of state on the server and then ‘rewinding’ the state when an action notification arrives. It then checks to see where the target was when the command was given and then updates its state accordingly. This has the effect of being more charitable to people with laggy connections, but it can result in some odd results for people not handicapped in such a manner. For instance, a laggy Sniper can headshot someone who appears out in the open to them, but by the time the server figures out the person has been headshot, that person has retreated behind a wall – yet dies anyway.

Competitive players seem to argue that it’s easier to deal with the lag by adjusting your timing than the unpredictability of lag compensation – this is arguable. In any case, it sounds like they just want an option to turn off lag compensation at the server level, which is a reasonable option that doesn’t affect the game for regular players.

Critical Hits

This is probably the biggest thing that the competitive community has complained about (and already addressed). Critical hits are high damage attacks that for the most part occur randomly (with a few exceptions – all Sniper headshots are criticals, all Spy backstabs are criticals, and any attack while being charged by a Kritzkrieg are criticals). It’s possible to increase your chance of getting a critical hit by racking up kills, subject to a cap of 25% (which gets reset after you die).

Needless to say, the competitive community balked at this randomness being introduced into the game, and as a result pretty much all competitive games are played with crits turned off. However, as far as I know most competitive leagues still allow the Medic’s Kritzkrieg as it is deterministic (100% crits no matter what), and can be a game-changer under certain situations.

Again, much like the use of damage calculation, crits have the effect of lessening the impact of individual skill – a good Scout can still be taken down by a mediocre Soldier if he gets a lucky crit. Having been the beneficiary (and target) of several lucky crit rockets, I’m pretty sure that removing crits was the only way to go for competitive play.

All that said, Valve has catered to the competitive crowd in their numerous updates – Arena mode in the Heavy update was targeted at them (the characteristics of this mode make it ideal for competitive play), and more recently they removed the setup time from Granary, one of the most favoured competitive maps, which was a change that the competitive community had been asking for for a long time. On top of that, in spite of all the flaws I’ve mentioned (and doubtless a few others that I’ve missed), TF2 is still pretty successful as a competitive game (although not nearly to the extent of the old faithfuls Counter-Strike and Quake III Arena).

I’ve only recently gotten back into first-person shooters after a long absence from the genre (before I got my current desktop the newest one I had played was probably the original Half-Life), so reading about what makes high-level FPS play tick is pretty damn interesting to me. I hope this little overview was at least slightly interesting to you as well.

On an unrelated note, in spite of my misgivings I’ve gone ahead and preordered Sonic Unleashed for the Wii. I intend to use it as a gauge of whether the PS3 version will be worth my cash come December, although of course the $10 discount coupon I got from Amazon for my next video game purchase didn’t hurt either.

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/games/mirrors-edge-review.ars

It looks like my worst fears about Mirror’s Edge might have come true – great platforming mechanics hobbled by substandard level design. The best I can hope for is that the PC version comes with some sort of map editor so that the community can pick up where the developers seem to have failed.

In other platforming news, Sonic Unleashed arrives next week. I’m still not sold on the game, given that long sections of the speed part of the game seem to be on autopilot (or something very close to it) and that the Werehog sections are basically all the platforming bits that SHOULD have been in the main game mixed in with a pale imitation of God of War.

At the very least the sidescrolling parts of the regular levels remind me a little of Sonic Rush, although dumbed down – the level design is a good deal simpler, lacking for instance the multiple routes present in Sonic Rush Adventure and replacing the trick system with (of all things) QTEs.

I actually have a lot of things to say on the subject of Sonic Unleashed (as you might suspect) but it’s almost 1am so I think I’ll save that essay for another time.

So yeah, Left 4 Dead is pretty damn fun.

There aren’t nearly enough dedicated servers to meet demand, though. I spent more time trying to connect to games yesterday than I did actually playing. And doing peer-to-peer hosting puts all the AI load on the host’s computer.

I only have one thing to say:

That said, 2010 will be an interesting election to watch, given Obama’s lofty goals (as set out in his platform).

Vancouver is pretty gloomy this time of the year. I haven’t seen a single patch of sky yet.

I got to the embassy 30 minutes earlier than my appointment time but there was already a queue waiting for me. All things considered, it was a fairly anticlimatic experience; a 40-minute wait in a queue followed by a 20 minute wait to have my fingerprints taken, concluding with an uneventful interview. I was told my passport would be ready to be picked up the next day.

I met Oro for lunch after finishing up at the embassy, and had what I can only describe as a fun afternoon. After lunch he took me by train to an arcade located in the suburbs, where I finally got to play King of Fighters ’98 Ultimate Match. Needless to say, I really liked it. I got my ass kicked a whole bunch (mostly by a pretty good O.Yashiro/Rugal/EX Yamazaki player), but it was fun. It’s been ages since I stepped into a real arcade (2006 was the last time I stepped into Einstein’s in Austin), and it was awesome.

They also had a couple of Street Fighter IV cabs, and rather amusingly a Sengoku Basara X cab (which was naturally deserted). I didn’t try either of them, but SF4 looks pretty smooth in motion.

Tomorrow I hope to do a bit of sightseeing before picking up my passport. I wonder if the pub downstairs will be having an election night special or something…

(Oh, and the post title? I’m typing this from my old (circa 2004) laptop whose native res is 1024×768…the lowest resolution in which my blog is even readable)