Steam’s built-in DRM is far less annoying than anything else on the market, in my opinion, so this is a good move, I’d say.

My friend Perfect Stranger has posted pretty comprehensive impressions over at Orochinagi, so if you haven’t been following the news go read up on his thoughts here.

While I still like the way the game looks, the game itself is still not really impressing me that much. I’ve sort of gotten over the fact that the game doesn’t improve on the tagging system, but there are plenty of other things to complain about.

The main thing is that the game just feels incomplete at this point. I know that it’s technically not ‘complete’ yet (there are still four months before release) but we can assume that by this point they’re not going to be adding any more characters or major subsystems since they’ve already started public beta testing. At this point, not only does the roster feel small, the characters themselves seem to be exhibiting KOF2002 syndrome with small, stripped-down movelists.

A lot of comparisons are being drawn between this game and KOF’94, but that game actually let you use far standing normals to poke and control space effectively, and had DMs that you could actually combo into. It looks like SNKP is trying to get people to get into close range to use their strong attacks, but what’s actually happening is that players, noting that their standing normals have been nerfed, have resorted to using crouch Bs and Ds to poke and start combos instead, making for some rather boring matches overall. The minimalist system just doesn’t really seem like KOF to me, not after SNKP managed to hit two successive balls out of the park with KOFXI and KOF’98 Ultimate Match (with the upcoming KOF2002 Unlimited Match looking to follow in their footsteps).

The graphical makeover is astounding, but I still stand unimpressed.

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.

The demo consists of a tutorial level and what I assume is the first level of the game, that takes place on a series of building rooftops. Incidentally, this is the same level that was shown when the game was revealed for the first time.

Amazingly, I must say, the demo lived up to my expectations. Somehow DICE has managed to craft a first-person platformer that feels right. It reminds me of old-school (read: Genesis) Sonic the Hedgehog games a whole lot, as in there are multiple intertwining routes you can use to navigate the level (although the progression is still very much linear) and there’s a heavy focus on maintaining momentum through good timing and using it to pull off platforming stunts in the game world.

Where it differs, of course, is in elements like combat (which, again, focuses on disarming and incapacitating your opponents quickly rather than engaging in shootouts with them). Combat is fairly simple, in that you have a single button for melee attacks and another button for disarming. The trick is to combine your melee attacks, jumps/slides and disarming moves in such a way as to get the opponent out of your way as quickly as possible – in other words, to minimise their impact to your momentum.

In addition, there’s a mode called ‘reaction time’ that lets you slow down time briefly, allowing you to execute maneuvres like frontal disarms or precise jumps with more leeway. This ties neatly back into the core platforming since the ability to use reaction time is granted when you successfully manage to maintain your momentum for an extended period of time.

If I had to nitpick, there are a couple of things I would mention:

• The game uses Unreal Engine 3, meaning that things like dynamic shadows have aliased/jagged edges, which impairs the look of the game for me somewhat. On top of that, while the NPCs are modeled and animated extremely well, they seem rather crap at emoting, much like Mass Effect and other UE3 games I’ve seen.
• I found it a little tricky to use the right analogue stick to line myself up correctly for precision jumping – this is probably more of a personal preference, though, and I imagine you can tweak the sensitivity settings to get them exactly where you want them.

Overall, though, if the final product manages to maintain the quality of the level design through to the end, this should end up being a pretty damn good game. I imagine time trial nuts (myself included) will have a blast exploring the levels, trying to find that one improvement to their route that knocks precious seconds off their best times.

(Speaking of time trials, the demo also has a time trial mode, but to unlock it you need to have preordered the game on either Xbox 360 or PS3. I’ve already decided to wait the extra two months for the PC version, so I wasn’t able to try it out)

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is Half-Life 2.

If the whole game took place in Ravenholm.

And if the only enemies you ever encountered were fast zombies.

And if there were roughly TWO BILLION OF THEM on screen at once.

So yeah, this game looks ridiculously intense. Only the 360 version was on display, but it’ll be hitting PC as well. The part that interests me the most is the promise of an intelligent “director” that will dictate zombie spawns based on how well you and your team are playing.

On a side note, hilarious convo I overheard at the L4D booth:

Guy: So how does the difficulty scale?
Valve Employee: <explains about the intelligent director AI>
Guy: And my other question is…when is the Team Fortress 2 content coming to the Xbox?
<long, awkward silence>
Valve Employee: So anyway, this game will be out in November…

Mirror’s Edge

Annoyingly, I wasn’t able to play this either. I got within 3 heads of the demo booth but then the PS3 that was serving my line crashed and had to be turned off. A wonderful waste of half an hour (which precluded my attending the Spore onstage demo in the main theatre…grr)!

That said, the game still looks good. It seems to emphasise maintaining momentum and finding the best route through the level, both of which remind me of the old-school Sonic games (except with a whole lot more death pits).

Battlefield Heroes

I tried this out in the corner of the EA booth. The cartoony art style is quite nice and implemented reasonably well, but the game feels a little slow for my taste…maybe I’m too used to TF2‘s frantic pace, or the maps are way too large for the number of players allowed per map. I overheard one of the EA people mentioning that the game runs off the same engine as Battlefield 2142, if anyone’s interested.

Valkyria Chronicles

This is the second game I got to play (largely because Sega’s booth was basically deserted). Still, I was pleasantly surprised – this is a turn-based strategy game for the PS3 with a rather pleasant manga/watercolour art style. The thing that makes this one unique is that when you decide to move a unit, you can move it around from a third-person perspective on the battlefield. In addition, you can go into an over-the-shoulder aiming mode (much like RE4 or Gears of War) in order to attack enemy units (and the enemies seem to take different levels of damage depending on where you shoot them). Making your units take cover between turns is also important if you want them to avoid taking damage. Instead of each unit having a limited number of turns, you have a fixed pool of action points which you can then allocate as you see fit, for instance, moving certain units multiple times. I only played one mission so I’m not sure how these action points are awarded.

Still, the game looked good, so it’s one more to add to my PS3 watch list.

The Conduit

This game made headlines a while back when the developers announced the creation of a game engine for Wii that could produce effects on par with other current-generation titles. I got to see the game in action today, and it does look like the developers have succeeded in crafting a competent FPS for the Wii. I don’t know about the graphic quality, though – while the weapon and enemy effects are well done, the environments look rather bland and samey. It looks competent at the very least.

Random tidbits

• Fallout 3 looks very, very nice…no idea how it compares to the first two since I haven’t played either one, but the basic quest structure etc seems to follow Oblivion pretty closely.
• Starcraft II looks positively orgasmic but the queue to play it was way too long since each person got to play an entire match. It does look basically like Starcraft with a fresh coat of paint and some modern amenities, but that’s perfectly fine as far as I’m concerned.
• Wii Music looks like rubbish…this was made even clearer by the Guitar Hero: World Tour booth set up right next to it.
• No Capcom presence, except at the Udon booth, so no playable Street Fighter IV :(
• Bioware was doing periodic showings of Dragon Age: Origins, but I decided not to attend, given my somewhat uneven experience with Mass Effect so far. Also, it was late and I was getting hungry :p
• I saw a lot of families at the convention…definitely not something I would have expected!

All in all, the games I did yet to see and/or play were reasonably illuminating. I somehow think I would have had a lot more fun had I been with someone I knew, though…

I suspect EA and Tilted Mill Studios are well aware of this, because last week they released a demo of the game, based on the most recent patch of the game, that supposedly adds a new strategic layer to the game. I decided to take it for a run, and for some context, I decided to compare it to another recent city simulator, City Life by Monte Cristo Software.

Just to get it out of the way, Societies has almost nothing in common with SimCity 4. The overarching world map is gone, along with the trade mechanics that came with it. Zoning has been axed – you just plop down buildings wherever you want now, much like in SimTown. In fact, many of the levers that you could use to exercise control over your city, like tax rates, building-specific funding levels and the like have been removed.

So what has been added in its place? A fair amount, actually. Buildings now either generate or consume one or more of 6 different traits. For instance, building murals generates ‘creativity’, which you can then use to build ‘creative’ structures like clown training schools (don’t ask). Depending on what sorts of buildings you build, your city will start to exhibit certain characteristics. On top of that there’s the general level of citizen happiness which is controlled by building leisure structures. The game actually shows you labour demand and supply now, so you need to keep the number of jobs roughly equal to the number of workers.

In ‘Strategic Mode’ (the new mode that the most recent patches have introduced), additional layers of complexity are added on top of this – for one, you now have some control over the levels of funding different types of structures will receive. These options are nowhere near as granular as SimCity 4 or even SimCity 2000, but they are nice to have. On top of that, you can’t simply place structures at will any more, as each structure now incurs an ‘upkeep’ cost that you need to consider before you build it. There are also ordinances you can enact for a cost to change global parameters in your city, much like in the previous SimCity games. Needless to say, Strategic Mode is really the only mode you should be interested in playing. In addition, there are varying levels of Strategic Mode, and harder levels will make it harder to strike the necessary balance to keep your city growing.

So the game actually has some strategic depth now. I can’t actually say how this depth works out in the long run since all I played is a demo. I will say, however, that in spite of the added complexity, the UI is a bit of a clusterfuck, far from the elegance of earlier SimCity games. Information is rarely available in a few clicks, and is often lacking in the kind of detail that I need. For instance, upkeep is displayed in terms of a daily cost, but the budget window shows cost/revenue information on a weekly or monthly basis, and in the form of a line graph of all things. This tells me nothing about what my exact shortfall is, which might help me decide what structures I need to build next. People accuse SimCity 4 of being too complex, but its budget window was far more elegant and gave me all the information I needed with a single glance.

In addition, I think restricting you to placing single buildings at a time really makes expanding your city more tedious than it needs to be. It might just be a personal preference, but if you need to create jobs in a hurry, you want to spend less time futzing around in submenus and more time actually placing structures that might create jobs.

Overall, I think Societies has been improved significantly from its initial release, but I’ll need to spend some time with the actual game in order to figure out how much improvement has been made.

And now, City Life.

I honestly hadn’t heard of Monte Cristo before City Life‘s release – their backlog of titles isn’t really anything worth talking about. City Life takes a similar tack to Societies, in that it tries to emphasize the ‘personality’ of a city, but it takes a far more realistic (and I think, superior) approach. It defines 6 subgroups of society, their needs, lifestyles and the interactions between them, and requires that you consider these interactions while building your city. As a consequence, certain parts of your city will be distinct from one another, rather than your entire city taking on a monolithic personality like something out of an old JRPG.

The rest of the game basically plays like SimCity 4 with some modifications, making City Life a spiritual sequel to that game. Even the in-game interface is practically a clone (with the exception that you can now free rotate and zoom to a first-person view). It takes the same approach as Societies does with regards to buildings, in that it has you place structures individually, but it also wisely lets you build up large areas with particular types of structures at once, which is effectively zoning.

However, the game doesn’t really teach you how to use this new complexity very well. The ‘tutorial’ is basically a slideshow, and not in-game. Depending on where you place your zones/buildings, they will be more attractive to certain subgroups, but the game never told me how I was supposed to make them appealing to certain subgroups, leaving me with a shortage of blue-collar workers and no idea how to redress it. In addition to this, there doesn’t appear to be much variation in the structures that get built when you say, build housing for fringe citizens. Societies definitely fares better in this regard.

All in all, though, City Life leaves me with a better impression than Societies does. The developers’ next game is a version of the game for the DS (which I suspect may not turn out that well) and a massively multiplayer version called Cities XL, which really sounds incredible. It’s good to see that even though Maxis is no longer working on SimCity titles, another developer has picked up the baton and run with it.

Angry people on the Internet actually caused change…I WA SHOCK!
The new scheme still limits you to three installs, which is lame, but the need to activate every ten days has been replaced with a check every time new content is downloaded, which is more reasonable. It’s not quite perfect, but it’s about where BioShock’s copy protection was, which is slightly annoying but acceptable.

In other EA PC gaming adventures, both this and this are looking really cool. I don’t know what’s more surprising – the fact that DICE is making something that isn’t a Battlefield game, or that said game is an Unreal Engine 3 game whose predominant palette colour isn’t brown.

But then EA goes and pulls a stunt like this with two of the biggest upcoming PC releases; games which I had been very much looking forward to.

I guess the appearance of security (and mind you, it is only for appearances – the probability that this copy protection will be broken by an enterprising hacker is pretty much 100%) is far more important than customer goodwill.

(BTW, anyone who suggest I should buy a 360 to play Mass Effect can go die in a fire)