tempest in a teacup

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.

I’ve been putting a fair amount of effort into tackling my gaming backlog recently, with the end goal of putting myself into a position where I can play something that came out within the last few months. Unfortunately, surprise sales by PC game download stores do not help in this regard. Since my last update I’ve added Call of Duty 4 ($15 on Steam at the time) and Painkiller ($6 from GoG.com) to my backlog. Fortunately I’ve also beaten one and the majority of the other in that time, so I can talk a bit about their differing approaches to FPS design.

CoD4 is of course more popular than Jesus (or so I’m told), and there’s still a significant contingent of people playing it on the PC (the less said about MW2 the better). CoD4 is very much made in the mould of the more recent generation of first-person shooters – regenerating health and all. That said, it’s not a pushover – great importance is placed on avoiding damage through taking cover or killing enemies before they have a chance to shoot you, since on Hardened and above you die in very few hits. Because of this there’s also a strong emphasis on being highly accurate with your shots, much like in, say, Counter-Strike. I’m not a huge fan of this type of FPS since my skill at getting consistent headshots is non-existent (spec me when I’m playing Sniper in TF2 and you’ll see what I mean), but I don’t mind it. That said it took some time for me to get used to since I don’t typically play games with tons of hitscan weapons and low player HP.

I haven’t tried the game online yet, but I might at some point. I don’t expect to do too well, though.

On the other side of the coin, we have Painkiller, a game from a much older tradition – namely, the original Quake. There is no cover system, no headshot mechanic, and no realistic weapon damage. What there is are five well-crafted weapons, each with a unique primary and secondary fire mode (so it’s really more like ten weapons), a few million guys to kill and some gorgeous-looking levels to kill them in. That said, this isn’t Serious Sam where they just let you loose in a giant open field and throw enemies at you – the enemies are very well-designed, and taking them down while minimizing damage to yourself can often be rather challenging. To give an example there’s one level where you need to fight off tons of shotgun/bayonet wielding soldiers. There are literally tons of these guys, and they can actually outrun you, even if you bunnyhop. At the same time, though, there are bigger guys who have miniguns and are shooting at you from further away. And if you try to get into the fray and take out the little guys with your shotgun, look out for the giant guys with the flamethrowers. As a result, beating the level comes down to a frantic game of moving quickly and efficiently while firing shots and switching weapons like mad to thin the horde that’s bearing down on you and chipping away at your health. It really feels like a single-player version of Quake III Arena, which is why I’m loving the hell out of it. After you clear an entire horde by the skin of your teeth, the sense of accomplishment is palpable.

Also, there’s a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning.

Overall I’d say I prefer Painkiller over CoD4, although that’s largely a function of my time spent playing games like Doom and Quake while growing up. Your mileage will probably vary.

In other news, with Gintama finally being off the air I’m casting around for other shows to watch. I’m currently enjoying Crunchyroll’s simulcast of Durarara!!, and I’ve started pulling up older shows on Hulu, like Baccano! and Darker than Black. If you have any recommendations for stuff that I might be interested in (preferably over a streaming service of some kind), do let me know in the comments.

Don’t really have anything substantive to say right now, other than the fact that both Crysis games are off the backlog, and that Call of Duty 4 is now added to it.

In the meantime, have some moonwalking Hazama.

My personal life has been undergoing a bit of turmoil recently, but I’ll leave that for another blog entry. For now, I thought I’d jot down some thoughts about a bunch of games I’ve been playing recently.

• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
  Great sequel, although somewhat easier than the first game. That said, it had some great set pieces (the battle on the train was particularly entertaining) and the final boss was a lot more fun than UC1’s. Definitely worth a buy if you own a PS3, but you probably knew that already.
• Sonic and Sega All-stars Racing
  This game honestly surprised me. It’s a Mario Kart clone through and through, but it’s a pretty good one. Decent selection of tracks, and although there are a few too many Sonic characters, there are a few interesting nostalgia Sega picks like Opa-Opa, Bonanza Bros, Alex Kidd and of course Ryo from Shenmue. The balance could be better (right now it looks like flying characters are at a disadvantage while bike characters are overpowered) but it’s still rather fun to play.
• Crysis
  Pretty damn fun. The first half of the game lets you tackle your objectives in a fairly open-ended manner, while the second half ramps up the difficulty and throws tons of gunfights at you. Both are good fun, although the vehicle sections have some pretty annoying controls (VTOL sequence, I’m looking at you). And of course, the game looks gorgeous. I’d recommend not getting the Steam version if you have a 64-bit OS, though – for some reason it doesn’t include the 64-bit binary. On top of that the game occasionally just runs like a dog on my admittedly pretty good PC. Given that Warhead runs so much better I have no idea why the first game is such a hardware hog.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
  I’ve said pretty much everything I wanted to say about this game over at the Orochinagi forums and I don’t feel like typing it all up again, so here’s a link to the relevant thread for you to read.
• Sonic 4: Episode One
  The more I see of this game the less it interests me. So much for classic Sonic – what we’re getting is Sonic Rush Adventure in HD with crappy physics and speed boosters up the arse. I’ll stick to my copy of Sonic CD for my classic Sonic fix, thanks.

As for the backlog, now that I’ve beaten Crysis, this is what’s left:

1. Crysis Warhead
2. Deus Ex
3. PoP Warrior Within
4. PoP The Two Thrones
5. PoP (2008)
6. Resident Evil 5 (STILL looking for someone to play this co-op with me…)
7. God Hand (got to the third area, promptly got my ass handed to me)

…actually surprised me a little.

I wasn’t expecting the tag system to be resurrected, and indeed it looks like it’s hasn’t been. However, they’ve done something else, and resurrected a subsystem that was last seen in KOF2002 and KOF NeoWave – free cancelling (now called drive cancelling). Both implementations of the mechanic are at play here, which is a nice option to have, especially given that they have different risk/reward ratios – drive cancelling without bursting stock is easy but can only be done a limited number of times, while bursting stock in mid-combo is harder but lets you do as many cancels as you want until the bar ends.

EX moves are a decent addition too – the ability to spend a stock to do a version of your move that has different properties is something KOF hasn’t had before and I welcome its arrival. So far it looks like EX DMs will be a decent substitute for SDMs as well, although I have yet to see any videos where they’re used.

They also seem to have restored most characters’ movelists, to varying extents. For instance Mature doesn’t have only two special moves any more, and Elisabeth’s movelist resembles her XI incarnation more than her weird XII outing. On the other hand Kyo is still based on his boring ‘95 incarnation (with the addition of an aerial version of his Orochinagi for some reason) and there are some strange movelist omissions (for instance, Yuri got back most of her moves…except her uppercut which was the linchpin of her combos).

For some reason they also ditched the only subsystems from XII that I liked – the guard attack and chargeable CD attacks, replacing them with the traditional guard cancel knockdown attack. The former was good since it made counterattacks anticipatory rather than reactionary, and the latter was a nice option to have while on the offense, although the removal of the ability to cancel into CD attacks might diminish its usefulness somewhat.

On an aesthetic note, the music, as heard on the official site, is much better than XII’s. It still doesn’t quite beat KOF2002 Unlimited Match for me, but it’s solid background music, and the motifs for the individual teams (sax in Iori’s theme, fast-paced synth-laden rock for Ash, upbeat, jazzy tunes for the Ladies’ team) seem to be intact. I look forward to having some epic battles with these tunes in the background.

As far as graphics go, they’ve removed the zooming that was present in XII, so the sprites are now displayed at a smaller size. Given that the sprites are upscaled from 480p to begin with, I regard this as a good thing as it makes the sprites appear less pixelated compared to the backgrounds. However, they’ve also gone ahead and applied some sort of smoothing filter to the sprites that make them appear out of focus compared to the backgrounds. This was a big personal gripe with KOFXI and NGBC– the first thing I did after buying both games for the PS2 was to go into the options and turn off the filter. Why would you produce some great pixel artwork (upscaled, yes, but still really good) and then ruin it with a shitty blur filter? I hope the home ports retain the ability to disable it.

As far as roster goes, it’s known (thanks to some now-removed hidden files on the official KOFXII website) that three of the remaining characters to be revealed will be the K’ team, although no-one knows yet who will feature on the team alongside K’ himself. The other slots are on the Kim team, AOF team and Yagami team, and based on some missing character data found on the KOFXII disc, are probably going to be Hwa Jai (from Fatal Fury 1), Takuma and Vice – although SNKP may go ahead and decide to toss us a curveball yet.

Overall, though, so far KOFXIII has generated far more interest from me than KOFXII ever managed to, so I find myself anticipating the weekly SNKP site updates quite eagerly. I suppose that’s a nice change.

(Pictures from Impress Game Watch’s KOFXIII writeup)

I’ll skip my usual preamble. :P

I just traded in a bunch of old games (KOF XII, Castlevania DoS, Elite Beat Agents, Worms Open Warfare 2, Pokemon Pearl and Ninja Gaiden DS, if you’re curious) for a total of about $30 in Amazon gift card credit, and I’m wondering what I should get with it. These are the options I’m looking at (based on my Amazon wishlist):

• Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3)
• Assassin’s Creed II (PS3)
• Yakuza 3 (PS3) – although I’m thinking of springing for the import since the US version has cuts
• Baccano! DVD box set
• A Bit of Fry and Laurie DVD box set

Alternatively if you have any other suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them…

Looks like King of Fighters XIII is en route.

(logo yoinked from Dengeki Online)

To be clear, I didn’t like KOF XII at all. I did pay $60 for the game, but in retrospect, my money would have probably been better spent on something else. And no, my complaints have little to do with the lacklustre console port – they all centre around what was done to the game system itself. General dumbing down, removal of anything that might be potential interesting and highly stripped-down movelists that made even my usual go-to KOF characters boring as hell to play. Oh yeah, and the stuff about the sprites being upscaled didn’t really help either.

To be honest, the fact that everyone’s complaint about the game seems to be ‘the game plays fine, but the port sucks’ just astounds me. I have to conclude that these people never really played the games that came before XII (the great KOF XI and KOF’98 Ultimate Match) and what came after it (the equally great KOF2002 Unlimited Match). I regard all of those games as superior to KOF XII in every way, simply because their systems were far more interesting. They may not have fancy fake-HD sprites with tons of frames, but they make up for it by actually being fun to play. XI took 2003’s incomplete tag system, fleshed it out and made it awesome; ‘98UM added new twists to a classic formula without breaking it (I actually have a reason to try and use the Extra mode meter and dodging now) and 2002UM addressed my only problems with the original game (crappy aesthetics and stripped-down movelists) while making enough system tweaks to be interesting.

Out of the new stuff KOF XII added, I only regard the Guard Attack and guard crush CDs as interesting, and the latter already made an appearance in KOF NeoWave (albeit in a slightly different form). Critical counters and deadlocks are too rare and too difficult to get to be of any consequence, and the changes they made to how close and far attacks work is just off-putting. Why the hell would I want Shen Woo’s close C from a full character length away?

Anyway, what does all of this have to do with KOF XIII?

Simply put, I’m not super confident about it. Based on a comment from Falcoon back in 2006 (shortly after XI’s arcade release), they worked on KOF XII for 3 1/2 years before releasing it, and the end result of that was a game that felt stripped down in every single way. Given also that the first build of the game at AOU 2009 didn’t even have super meters and most of the subsystems implemented, I’d say that the bulk of the time was spent on drawing those fancy new sprites. They’ve had a year to work on the game since then, but given that these sprites take so long to draw (SNKP themselves said it’s 16 months per character in terms of man-hours), I’m not expecting a major shakeup in the game system. Maybe everyone gets a new move or two, and we get 2-3 new characters at most.

Hey, maybe they’ll add super cancels! Or a multiple-level power meter! That’d truly be revolutionary.

…

So yeah. I’m keeping an eye on it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Nice logo though.

So apparently someone leaked a video of Sonic 4 running on the 360, and it seems like some of my concerns were well-founded. The physics seem really off – since when did jumping while running on a flat surface give you that much horizontal momentum? Why doesn’t Sonic accelerate as he falls? Why are his jumps so floaty? How is the game letting him stand on an inclined surface without falling? And so on. Not to mention booster pads. Leave those in the Rush and Advance games, please – I like to earn my momentum, not have it handed to me on a plate.

And apparently Dimps is developing, which again tells me that no-one inside Sonic Team probably has any idea how to develop a 2D Sonic game in the classic style any more. Not that Dimps is infinitely more knowledgeable about this, mind you – the only game they’ve made that came anywhere near classic Sonic physics was the first Sonic Advance. And so far this game looks like it’s using Sonic Rush physics. For a demonstration of the silliness possible in that game, I refer you to this video:

At least the game looks rather nice.

People are claiming this is an alpha build, and that’s true. Maybe I’m getting agitated about nothing. But at the very least you’d think they’d have nailed the physics engine before starting to build full levels. ESPECIALLY since they’re claiming this is the revival of classic Sonic.

I wonder when it was that developers stopped listening to good players?

Yes, I’m aware that’s a generalization – not all developers do this. However, the developers of the games that I play most often seem to, and that’s not a good thing at all.

Gaming has become a lot more popular than it was when I was a kid – everyone and his mom seems to have an Xbox, whether to play the latest iteration of Madden or the FPS flavour of the month. The immediate effect of this is that pretty much every developer has been wondering how to appeal to this newly-expanded gaming demographic. The more insidious effect has been that they’ve started dumbing down their games to appeal to this demographic.

As an example, let’s take a look at Team Fortress 2. Simply put, they removed tons of stuff that had been present in TFC in order to simplify the game and make it appeal to Joe Gamer whose only experience with FPSes up to that point was probably Halo. This included several advanced techniques like concussion jumping, several weapons (super shotguns, railguns, nailguns, all the grenades), as well as weapon-specific ammunition and armor. Even some of the seemingly innocent changes caused the game to be dumbed down – for instance, the fact that friendly fire is off and you don’t collide with your teammates makes it easier to spy check and thus severely limits the Spy’s usefulness. And let’s not forget the obvious – critical hits and random damage spread.

The result is that the game sort of works if you’re playing it casually, but as soon as you try to get better at it you start to run into problems. High level play in TF2 involves class limits out of necessity and only uses a small set of maps since most of the game modes aren’t particularly suited to it. The end result is that TF2’s high level scene is markedly smaller than that of other games like CS and Quake.

Not enough? Let’s look at another recent Valve game, Left 4 Dead. This game was sold primarily as a co-op game, and in that respect it works decently, although the weapon balance is rather poor. However, Valve also saw fit to add a Versus mode, which was plainly not designed with high-level play in mind, much like TF2. The survivors are blatantly overpowered, with all sorts of abilities at their disposal – this is in addition to the poorly balanced weapons. A team of skilled survivors all wielding autoshotguns is pretty much guaranteed to make it to the safe room most of the time. This situation didn’t really improve in the sequel – while the infected did get buffed a little, the survivors gained several more abilities, such as defibrillators to bring dead teammates back to life, bile grenades to distract hordes, grenade launchers and high-damage melee weapons.

The effect of this on high level play is that various player-developed mods need to be used to achieve any semblance of balance at all. And these mods basically remove several item types from the game and reducing the influence of the AI director in order to achieve this goal.

Now you might ask, “but SonicTempest, aren’t games supposed to be fun? Why are you treating them like SERIOUS BUSINESS?” To which I would reply: “What do you mean by fun?” What someone finds fun isn’t going to be fun for everyone else. Some people have fun messing around in 32-player low-gravity mario_kart servers in TF2, whereas others have fun learning the ins and outs of a game and mastering its nuances of its ruleset. Note also that someone’s perception of fun changes over time – at one point I enjoyed playing Pyro on 32-player instaspawn Dustbowl as much as any casual player out there. However, after 300 or so hours of playtime, about half of which have been spent playing Soldier almost exclusively and trying to learn the class as best as I can, my definition of fun has changed, based on the simple fact that my skill level has increased. This change has also led me to realise that playing TF2 in pubs is becoming less and less fun for me, simply because of all the things built into this game that hinder high level play.

The conclusion, therefore, is that developers need to design their games with high level play in mind first and foremost for them to remain interesting. Most people’s response to this approach is that it ‘alienates new players’ – which is a premise with which I disagree quite strongly. Look at games like Starcraft and Quake. These games have very high skill ceilings which is the main reason their high level play scenes continue to thrive even today (keep in mind that these games came out ten years ago!) Yet is either game any less fun at low levels of play? I played Quake and Quake III Arena deathmatch back when the games were new, and I was by no means a good player, yet I still had fun with both games. Similarly, I was terrible at Starcraft, but this didn’t diminish my enjoyment of my weekly matches with my high school friends one bit. And these games are still great fun to play, even today – I played Starcraft with my fellow interns while I was in India back in 2006, and even though I still sucked at it, it was every bit as entertaining as it was back in 1998.

Will I be able to say the same about TF2 or L4D ten years from now? I doubt it.

PS: I spent most of this post talking about FPSes, but this is something that’s becoming prevalent across all genres. A little game called “King of Fighters XII” comes to mind…and some might even say that Street Fighter IV falls into this category.