tempest in a teacup

Went to PAX with Perfect Stranger (friend from Singapore), so I figured I’d write a short piece about the stuff I played and saw.

And before you ask, no, I didn’t get to play Duke Nukem Forever. The queue was way too long and I wasn’t about to waste two hours in line to experience the revolutionary ability to pee by pressing R2.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4

Oh god, where to start.

I don’t know what version of the game was playable at PAX, but the physics were pretty fucked up. Sonic has a LOT of inertia before he starts going, and this also extends to trying to jump sideways from a standing position. I actually had trouble jumping onto a higher ledge to reach a spring. Also, rolling STILL doesn’t make you go faster down slopes. In fact, you slow down, which is about as far from ‘classic Sonic’ as you can possibly get.

PS also managed to break the physics in a bunch of ways, returning to a neutral animation after bouncing off a spring by pressing the down button, and managing stand still on an incline. Way to go, guys!

On top of that the general prepoderance of doodads that force you to speed up or bounce in certain directions hasn’t changed at all, so overall I’m going to be giving this a miss.

Sonic Colors

This was a lot more fun, however! It’s basically Sonic Unleashed’s daytime levels with slightly modified physics (Sonic feels a bit less slippery) and the addition of Wisp power-ups. Given that it’s been eons since power up items have made an appearance in any Sonic game, their inclusion has me very much interested. I also noticed a bunch of alternate routes and secret items that you could get if you found the right paths. Bottom line? I’m probably going to be picking this up.

Guild Wars 2

I hung out at the booth a bit since PS was interested in the game, but the game does look rather nice. The developers demoed a boss fight with a giant flaming dragon monster – giant as in a few hundred times the players’ size. Looked great, and apparently it’ll be possible to jump into PvP immediately with a level 20 character. I usually avoid MMOs, but PS insists that I should give this one a go, so I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?

Marvel vs Capcom 3

I gave this game a go and had the misfortune of being paired up against someone who obviously knew what he was doing, and lost all three characters to Dr Doom lockdown. That said it felt pretty fast and responsive, and even though I kept trying to air dash as Ryu I may pick this up once it’s released.

Epic Mickey

I gave this a shot since I was curious about what sort of game it was. Turns out it’s a sort of open-world platformer with mechanics revolving around spraying paint and thinner on the surroundings. It seemed pretty cool from what I was seeing, but the camera needed a bit of work, with some jumps being hard to gauge correctly.

And then my play experience was cut short when the game crashed during my play session! Wee.

Fallout: New Vegas

I gave this a shot randomly – Fallout 3 didn’t really impress me, but I had heard Obsidian was changing some things for this spinoff. One thing I noticed straight away was the presence of factions in the game, with your actions either improving or worsening your standing with each of these factions. This seems like a much better way to handle choice/consequence than Fallout 3’s karma meter (which is still in the game for some reason). I did want to try out the new Hardcore mode they had talked about, but it wasn’t on display as far as I could tell.

Random notes

• PS won tickets to an exclusive ArenaNet party, and then won an EVGA Geforce GTX 470 in a Guild Wars 2 raffle, the lucky bastard
• Everyone and their mom was using Modern Warfare 2 to demo their hardware, even the PC hardware manufacturers
• Everyone and their mom also seemed to be hosting Super Street Fighter IV tournaments
• I bought a Marvel vs Capcom branded Madcatz TE stick for $100 and a Gyakuten Saiban art book for $40 at Capcom’s booth
• Brink is looking kind of cool, but the queue was long
• Portal 2’s queue was long throughout the day – there was no way I was going to spend half the day waiting there, as much as I want to marry that game and have its babies
• PS and I took part in a Team Fortress 2 match to try and qualify for an Alienware raffle to win a Killer NIC card. The map was cp_steel, and with PS as my pocket Medic I managed to lead a bunch of successful pushes until the enemy team basically spammed us out of point E. Didn’t really help that we had two Medics and only one Soldier on a team of nine, either…
• I went to the ArenaNet party with PS but after I found myself trying to beat my high score in Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu in a corner I figured it would be best if I left early.

And to end on a colorful note, have some pics (mouseover for alt text):

Until next year!

It’s time for a random post about the games I’ve been playing!

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Then again the iPhone version of Espgaluda II on Novice difficulty isn’t exactly the best basis to make such a claim. I’m kind of interested in trying the 360 version now – anyone know if it’s any good?

Also apparently Cave’s next iPhone port is going to be Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu. Not really sure how that one is going to play on this device…

This is awesome

That said I don’t know that Sonic 2 is necessarily the best game to show that stuff off…it’s pretty streamlined compared to some of the other games.

Oh well, still funny!

• Starcraft II is out this week and I’m not buying it. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but I’m not. Part of it has to do with how I left all my RTS skills in 1998, but it’s mostly because Battle.net 2.0 repulses me. If you want to know why this is, go here and read this excellent article summarizing everything that’s wrong with Battle.net 2.0. You may retort that his point of view reflects only that of high level players (among which I surely don’t count myself), to which my response is that a company that treats its high level players – its BEST, MOST-VALUED CUSTOMERS – like dirt isn’t worth supporting.
• King of Fighters XIII is out in arcades, and as far as I can tell the reception seems to be far more positive than the one XII received, although someone discovered an infinite on day one and new weird bugs are popping up all the time (I particularly like the one that lets Takuma and Daimon do EX moves without spending bar. Wonder if SNK Playmore is going to let these issues be or if they’re going to issue a USB patch, especially if they want this game to show up for real at Tougeki next year.
• I was never a Marvel vs Capcom fan, but MvC3 looks like it might warrant a look from me, what with its novel character choices (Dante, Super Skrull, Amaterasu, Deadpool) and its fast-paced action. I also much prefer the art direction they’re going for with this game than the semi-realistic semi-stylized noncommittal style they have going in the SFIV series.
• Speaking of which, SF x Tekken? Really? Was anyone asking for this game to be made? I don’t play SFIV on anything higher than a casual level, but from what I hear Super SFIV still has systemic issues that need working out (like the lack of guard breaks, and the gigantic stages encouraging defensive play). I’m sure most SF players would prefer a sequel that actually addresses those issues rather than a vanity project designed to milk yet more money from the casual gamer who will play the game for a week and then trade it in.
• BlazBlue: Continuum Shift arrives this week! I have the PS3 version on preorder, but I also have an Xbox 360 on the way, so I’m wondering if I should get a copy of the 360 version too (I’ll need to get a stick for it too – no way I’m playing a 2D fighter on that shitty d-pad). Anyway, if you want a match, hit me up on PSN.
• Speaking of BlazBlue, I got my Gamebridge working again so I tossed up some old BBCT replays on my Youtube channel. Nothing spectacular, but I figured I should get it out of the way. I’ll post BBCS footage whenever I can.
• On a final note, I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2. This game is so much better than the first game it’s not funny – the combat is more challenging, the sidequests have more variety and the game is generally paced much tighter. Enjoying the game a lot so far.

Name: The Church of Wyler
IP/port: 216.244.67.137:27015
Players: 16

It’s a 16-player server, and the rotation is mostly 5CP maps + Gravelpit + KOTH + the few Payload maps I can stand. It also runs Sourcemod for handy things like map voting etc, so if you own TF2, drop in sometime!

Oh, and if you’re tired of all the engineer class spam…I’ve installed a class limits plugin too. *wink*

…I finally beat the original Deus Ex. And it makes me want to kick myself for not playing it back then.

To illustrate why this game is so important, it might help to make a few comparisons with more recent titles.

There are tons of games out there (mostly Bioware and Bethesda games) that advertise the fact that you can make choices in-game that have consequences. However, most of those consequences are fairly minor. For instance take Fallout 3 – one of the quests early on lets you decide whether or not to spare the town of Megaton or not by defusing or detonating its resident unexploded nuclear bomb. How you resolve this quest certain has consequences – for instance, it decides where your ‘base’ will be early on, and it will change certain characters’ attitudes towards you. That said, pretty much all the story quests are unaffected by this – they unfold in exactly the same manner, and you experience the main storyline the same way over multiple playthroughs. Sidequests might change, sure, but the main plot never does.

Deus Ex, however, has no such limitations. You can kill off major characters way before they’re supposed to have a major impact on the plot, and doing so will prevent those events from ever occurring (I actually did this). On top of that the decision making is thankfully free of the binary good versus evil distinction – heck, in most situations the options available to you aren’t really apparent unless you explore the areas and invest points in the correct skills. This even extends to the game’s conclusion – unlike Fallout 3 and so many other games that tout choice as a major selling point, there is no distinction between a ‘good’ ending and a ‘bad’ ending – once again, just choices with consequences, and you’re left to decide which choices are the most palatable to you. Believe it or not, it took me something like 30 minutes to decide which ending I wanted to go for.

Given that this game came out ten years ago, way back in 2000, it’s amazing and thoroughly disappointing that no game has managed to improve on it – not even its own sequel, apparently. Deus Ex 3 is on the horizon, but given that it’s being handled by a completely different development team, and that Warren Spector is busy making Mickey Mouse games for Disney, I’m not going to get my hopes up too much.

I’ve just started on Mass Effect 2, whose developers insist that the way the game unfolds will depend on how you beat the original Mass Effect. We’ll see, I suppose.

http://gizmodo.com/5566680/onlive-streaming-game-service-launches-first-year-free

So I guess I can say what I thought about the beta!

Long story short, it sucked.

I got invited to the beta once a server farm near me was spun up, and I immediately gave it a try. Unfortunately my concerns with the service, which I outlined over a year ago, turned out to be pretty dead on.

My two main concerns were 1) input lag and 2) picture quality. And neither fared particularly well during my time playing. I tried both Prince of Persia as well as Unreal Tournament III, and even in a single-player game like PoP the input lag was noticeable. However it couldn’t hold a candle to the mess that was UT3, which had something like half a second of input lag, completely messing up my aim and movement. On top of that it was prone to lag spikes, during which my screen would freeze and I’d be teleported a vast distance forward five seconds later. Last year, OnLive’s CEO claimed to have some sort of magical technology that would minimize the impact of round trip times on input responsiveness – I really want some of what he was smoking.

As for picture quality, I stated in my earlier entry that they had to be using some sort of compression to get the data size down to manageable levels. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what they’re doing. The feed you get is 720p in name, in that it consists of 720 horizontal rows of pixels, but it lacks the characteristic sharpness that you would get from running a game at 1280×720 on your own machine. And of course the compression artifacts get worse as your connection experiences hitches.

A new and exciting complaint many people have about the service has to do with its pricing model. You need to pay a subscription – but you also need to pay full retail price for any game you want to play, which seems completely boneheaded to me. I know there are the variable costs of servers to deal with, but surely if you’re going to buy large numbers of copies of a game to run on a server farm, that entitles you to some sort of bulk licensing deal?

In the end I’m sort of left wondering who this product is meant to serve. PC enthusiasts are just going to laugh at it and leave it alone, while people who might want to try some PC games are going to end up with a substandard experience, shorn of all the things that make PC gaming awesome – better graphics, more control options and customization. They might as well just stick to their consoles instead.

So I’m playing Super Mario Galaxy 2, backlog be damned. And it’s a pretty good game, just as I expected it to be. Sure, extra lives still grow on trees much like the original game, but the stages are inventive and it usually takes me a few tries to figure out the exact timing or trick to beating them.

One thing that I’m not glad about is the persistence of the silly motion controlled-stages.

Sure, there are fewer of them, and I’ve already gotten all the gold stars in all of them, but they still reinforce my held notion that the Wii’s motion control is a dead end for games on that system. There’s perhaps one use of the Wii remote’s motion sensor that I’ve been able to tolerate, and that’s its use as a pointing device (in games like Resident Evil 4, or any number of Wii FPSes).

Super Mario Galaxy, on the other hand, has you do stupid crap like hold your Wiimote vertically and tilt it to control a giant ball that Mario is balancing on. These stages are nowhere near as interesting as the pure platforming stages, and the controls aren’t anywhere near as precise as they need to be. It’s at times like those that I wish the game supported the Classic or GameCube controller.

After my experience with the Wii, Sony and Microsoft’s motion controllers have me more apprehensive of the kinds of crap they’re going to try and pawn off on the gaming public. I’ve heard rumblings of a motion controlled version of Sonic Riders for Natal…ugh.