tempest in a teacup

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.

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.