Friday, March 28, 2008

Hi-Tonic vs. Jiggle-Vision



Aside from containing our favorite objectified video game ladies, it's a pretty amazing feat considering this was animated for free by someone named Montyoum. There appear to be at least two other major animations in his portfolio, which I'll have to check out next.

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Season 4 is nigh

Even if you know the series backwards and forwards, be sure to check out the 8 minute summary over at SciFi.com. It's pretty damn funny, and contains such gems as "Starbuck and Apollo like each other, so they beat each other up," and "the survivors form a rag-tag fleet following the Galactica through space, where cameras have a hard time keeping up." I laughed, verily.

And Season 3 is out on DVD. Yum. I know it's been done before, but seriously. I could watch this over and over because it is, almost without hyperbole, the coolest goddamn thing ever.

CRASH COURSE IN ADAMA AWESOMENESS:

Friday, March 21, 2008

The heady aroma of the blogosphere

There's a week-long expose about Jack Thompson's Florida Bar misconduct trial going on over at Game Politics, and I've been reading some of the transcript excerpts. It's actually remarkably interesting, considering how dry most real-life courtrooms are. The coolest part has been seeing what Thompson himself is like in the courtroom (he's representing himself), when he's not sending snarky e-mails to game journalists or egging on the media's mind-bogglingly distorted view on gaming.

What surprised me the most is how he actually seems like a pretty good lawyer. He seems to know the rules and the talk (and, to some extent, when to break them) and comes off as anything but the inept boob most of us like to imagine him as. From the transcript (and frankly, from everything he's ever said that we've read about) he's really good at goading even other lawyers and judges, though the whole trial is pretty much about how that "skill" is coming back to bite him in the ass. His sparring with the judge(s) is pretty damn funny to read.

What I can't tell from the transcript, and what I'd really like to know, is just what the hell kind of conviction against video games he really has. Clearly it's a deep one; I can't believe that a balanced person would expend as much effort and subject himself to as much hatred and ridicule as Thompson does, just for publicity and self- aggrandizement. But at the same time, he seems much too calm (I'm speaking relatively, of course) and meticulous to be a flat-out lunatic on some crusade against the "demonic" influence of gaming. As far as I can tell he seems to see the gaming industry as an easy scapegoat for the broader cultural problem of violence (him and most of the media out there, unfortunately), but there's just this bizarre lack of sincerity that bothers me almost as much all all the bullshit invective he spews out. I really don't know what to make of it.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Dinosaurs: still awesome after all these years


Does anyone else remember the Dino Riders? It was pure 8 year-old (or nostalgic 22 year-old, heh) bliss - I mean, how could you possibly mess up time-traveling armies putting lasers and armor plating on dinosaurs and fighting on prehistoric Earth? You really can't. Now, if they'd just make a (decent) video game out of it...

And yeah, sorry my reviews are so lengthy - it just takes me that long to get all (or enough) of my thoughts out.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Sins of a Solar Empire review

A couple months ago, something (I think it was the short story collection, The New Space Opera that I picked up) started me off on a huge space/sci-fi kick. I started playing Homeworld: Cataclysm for the fourth or fifth time and actually finished it this time (much to my pleasure; I reviewed it here), played a week or so of EVE Online, and even tried out the original Galactic Civilizations to see if I like it any better than the sequel, which to me had somehow failed as a successor to Master of Orion II. Despite everyone and their mother seeming to love that game, I could never get into it or, apparently, its prequel.

Recently, my lust for space adventure is being slaked by been Sins of a Solar Empire. It bills itself as a "RT4X" game, melding the more traditional RTS with the typically turn-based "4X" games, including the aforementioned MoO2, the GalCiv games, and to a great extent, Sid Meier's Civ offerings. I remember how skeptical I was when I read the first preview of Sins and its plans to meld the strengths of 4X games with a real-time model, but somehow, they pulled it off, and they did a damn good job of it.

I'll get the technical bits out of the way first. The game's sound is pretty good; the sound effects range from classic pew pew lasers to one or two that I actually recognize from Starcraft (one unit makes me think I'm landing or lifting off Terran structures every time I click on it). Sins' unit voices range from the standard to the mildly hilarious - while the human TEC are your standard vocal fare, the voices of the sibilant-heavy Vasari are akin to classically campy insectoid or reptilian aliens from old sci-fi, which I think is exactly what the creators were going for, and it worked. The Vasari especially sound a bit absurd at times, but it's more charming than annoying. The music ranges from serene string tracks to war marches very suitable to the game's deliberately just-over-the-top feel. In a way, the music is the best part of Sins' sound, since it switches tracks based on what you're viewing and what's happening on-screen. The warlike songs come up when you're looking at a battle, and the calmer tracks start up as you view a peaceful planet, etc. It's a minor thing but it's a nice touch; I really hope that eventually they'll release a jukebox-type mod that will allow us to queue up our own music and tag them for context-appropriate playing, as the music just doesn't have the same punch after a few hours of playing.

The graphics and visuals are quite nice, I have to say. The planets, which can make or break a space game's visual appeal, look quite good, and while the default stars look less than stellar, they have a very nice effect to simulate the shifting of a star's corona. The interstellar backdrop to maps leaves a little to be desired, but not every space background can, or should, look like the ones from Homeworld. The ships generally look good, and each race has a distinct visual style that's pretty consistent across its ships. Nothing is jaw-droppingly beautiful (though several mods are making great strides towards high-rez textures), but this is actually the game's greatest graphical strength. The game's graphics can be scaled across a large range, making the game play quite smoothly even on older machines, including my own. Currently I'm finding a balance between mid-range graphics and the inevitable FPS lag that occurs during larger battles, but Sins' graphical scaling is a great feature.

I keep trying to come up with some way to fill in the blank so I can say "At heart, Sins is really a _______ game." But I can't really figure out which side of the RTS vs. 4X fence Sins sits on. As far as I can tell, it's a pretty genuine hybrid. Certain elements of the gameplay lean towards both design templates.

The fundamentals of gameplay will be familiar to anyone who's played a game in either genre, really. On most maps, you start with a single planet, a couple established mines (most astronomical entities have orbiting asteroids from which you can mine Crystal or Metal, the two non-Credit resources in Sins), and a frigate factory, which can make a few basic ship types. From this power base you expand your territory as you build up an ever-larger fleet, research new technologies, and tear holes in enemy ships with lasers, plasma bursts, and autocannons. That much is all pretty standard.

The interesting things begin to come out when you realize that on larger maps (and anything smaller than a one-star large map won't be very interesting after you get a halfway decent feel for the game), you're going to be dealing with potentially dozens of planets, multiple large fleets and defense garrisons, and upwards of half a dozen individual star systems. All in real time. It's extremely daunting, but Ironclad (Sins' developer) came up with a series of features that make it not just manageable, but easy.

The first of these, while arguably not directly a boon to UI friendliness, is the map setup. Each map is divided up in X number of star systems (the game makes the common mistake of labeling everything as a "solar system," a term which technically only applies to the one orbiting our own sun, but it's a very minor thing). Each star system is separate within the map, and can only be reached once certain technologies are researched. "Orbiting" each star are a number of planets, colonizeable asteroids, gas giants, wormholes, and other astronomical bodies. Each of these has a gravity well, where all the fighting and building and such occurs, and these are in turn connected by phase lanes. Phase lanes are the traversable paths between gravity wells, and they provide a kind of "terrain" (along with limited choke points) that keeps colonies from being entirely indefensible. The playing field is also effectively limited to a 2D plane; z-axis movement is quite possible but its strategic value is limited. While this removes a lot of tactical possibility, it also makes things easier to manage. Basically, the way the maps are set up keeps players from being overwhelmed by too may potential attack vectors and movement possibilities.

Another thing that keeps the player sane in the face of all this real-time responsibility is, simply put, the pacing of the game. Everything, from resource collection to research occurs at a fairly slow pace. Some might find this annoying, but it's necessary for the game to be playable. Even at its highest speed settings, ships can take several minutes to phase jump between planets, and for most ships moving across a gravity well can take equally as long (there's also the cool sidenote that ships moving toward a planet move faster than those moving away). Combat is similarly paced, with even a lopsided battle lasting several minutes. Primarily, what this means is that you could be upgrading several new colonies, ordering more frigates from your shipyards, and commanding two or three large fleet engagements at the same time, all without actually being too stressed about it. It does all add up, but compared to the micromanagement fests like Warcraft III, Sins is positively stately. A neat side-effect of the combat's pacing is that you can actually make an effective retreat. I've seriously never played an RTS before where this was reasonably possible, and god is it nice. If you're getting overwhelmed, you can usually hold out long enough to either run away or warp in some reinforcements. It actually makes it more strategic than tactical, which is a nice change of pace.

And when you can't quite keep up or don't want to spare the attention for a minor skirmish, the unit AI and autoattack/autocasting will handle it quite well. The autocasting deserves a special shout-out, far outdoing the feature's appearance in most other strategy games I can think of (and it's necessary, considering how many units have special abilities).

The two biggest reason Sins' large scale works are the zoom feature, and the Empire Tree. The zoom feature is pretty self-explanatory: via the mouse wheel or a trio of hotkeys, you can go from a close-up of a single ship to an overview of the entire star system. This is VITAL. You could easily play the entire game from the zoomed-out view, though that would hardly be as fun. The point is, you could. Conversely, you could also play the whole game from a fairly zoomed-in perspective, thanks to the Empire Tree. This transparent sidebar replaces the minimap most RTS's require to effectively represent the playing field. On it, your colonies, fleets, and points of engagement are all represented symbolically. You can select planets, issue orders to buildings and ships through it, and really do pretty much anything you would need to.

All these factors add up to a smooth, fun gameplay experience. If the game lacked any one of these features and UI innovations, the whole thing could buckle under its own ambition, but Ironclad pulled it off, and damn does it make me happy.

As a footnote, I should mention that the game doesn't have any campaign mode (it has a fully fleshed-out singleplayer mode, though). A lot of people, both reviewers and forum QQers, seem to think that this is a flaw. The developers basically said "this is not a standard RTS; no one's has every complained about Civilization or Master of Orion not having a campaign, why bitch now?" As much as I agree with this, though, a little part of me can't help but want a campaign storyline. I think that a big part of the call for a campaign is that Sins of a Solar Empire has a cast of surprisingly well fleshed-out races. Each is unique and has a lot more backstory and character than most 4X game races do. I think that I, and probably others as well, are reacting to this and a desire for more interesting story when they ask for an admittedly superfluous single-player campaign.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Best. Headline. Ever.

I don't think ABC did it first, but this was the only stable version I could find of this amazing headline.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Hellgate: London retrospective

Prior to its release, I'd been downright jubilant about Hellgate: London for a long time, and rambled on at great length. I had the Collector's Edition preordered long ahead of time, and even sprung for the Founder's offer (a lifetime online subscription) before I'd given the game a chance to prove itself one way or another. I'm not yet willing to say that that last part was a mistake, but I've definitely had second thoughts.

In a word, Hellgate is disappointing. In a few more words, it's disappointing and still remarkably fun, but unfortunately the thing that stuck with me the most after all my early, pre-beta fanboying and endless hours cruising the forums up to two years before the game came out, is that the game could and should have been so much more. I'm aware that I pretty much set myself up for this disappointment, but in a way that makes me all the more qualified to talk about it. In another way, it makes me less qualified, but we'll ignore that for the time being since all of three people will probably ever read this.

Hellgate: London promised to be Diablo 3, or at least its "spiritual successor," a term bandied about so often for classic games that all you can be really sure it means is "will be remarkably similar to..." Flagship Studies, of course, had a little more weight behind their claims than others, given that the core of their team was, in fact, the core of the Blizzard North teams and a slew of other qualified individuals. It looked like the perfect storm: practically the same people behind the game, an interesting new setting and set of conflicts, and the same addictive style of loot-based play that made every Carver Demon in Diablo II look like a tiny, shrill piƱata. It sounded pretty much foolproof.

The problem with spiritual successors is that all too often, they don't change enough from the classic game to keep pace with modern expectation. I'm not even talking about graphics; I'm mostly referring to current, established user interface conventions, level design, and certain minimum expectations for what constitutes online play. While classic games by definition got lots of things right, certain aspects of gaming have unilaterally advanced for the better, and in Hellgate, many of these lessons weren't quite learned.

Hellgate: London's graphics are decent, and the support for DX10 will give them some longevity. Most of the enemies look quite good, as do most of the player models (excepting some gaps in the graphics between pieces of armor). For some reason, however, other players' characters can only be viewed with low-res textures, which at the moment prevents much of the showiness that makes gear acquisition in multiplayer games so compelling. The game's sound is solid, with good explosions, slashing noises, and decent music, though the latter falls into Half Life 2's trap of only playing sporadically and at seemingly random times.

Hellgate's gameplay is undoubtedly one of its strong points. It follows the same basic formula of Diablo: fairly simplistic hack 'n' slash combined with loot lust of the most basic and fulfilling sort. You kill large numbers of mildly-threatening beasties and wait for the satisfying sound of coins, gear, and magic items hitting the floor. Flagship Studios got this aspect pretty perfectly, as I see it. It hits some snags when bosses just take heinously long periods of time to kill, an issue endemic to hack 'n' slash games. Boss fights are made challenging mostly by giving them obscenely large health pools, health oceans, really, rather than by giving them any unique or interesting abilities that actually make them difficult, rather than just tedious, to kill. But the majority of the time, the enemies appear in droves and drop with pleasant alacrity, speeding your movement towards the all-important loot. In this respect, the interface has improved considerably over its predecessors: the WoW-like skill bar allows effective use of most of your skills without interrupting the action.

The only real bumps in Hellgate's gameplay come in the form of the mission-based minigames sprinkled throughout the storyline. These have you doing such things as manning an AA gun to shoot down a giant demonic airship, playing capture the grimoire, and using RTS-style controls to lead a squad of friendly soldiers to safety. All of these sound good in theory, and FSS's attempts to spice up the gameplay with a little variety is laudable. However, all of these minigames are plagued by flawed design. Shooting down the demonic dirigible takes little more than holding down the trigger for five minutes straight, capture the grimoire is needlessly easy, and the squad command game is needless difficult and has no explanation of the controls. Thankfully, these minigames are the exception to the gameplay, and are just a good idea, poorly shoehorned into an otherwise smooth game. In general, however, the gameplay-related aspects of Hellgate's UI have been vastly improved over older titles', right down to a button that just vacuums up all the loot around you. The gameplay can only be described as "classic" which, while it might have negative connotations for some, is a great boon for Hellgate. Yes, it sticks to a very old formula, but in regards to gameplay it added just the right amount of innovation to keep it fun and still flow smoothly.

The UI's friendliness is mostly confined to shooting and looting, however. Inventory Tetris is back with a vengeance, though the pain it causes is mitigated by the ability to break down any item into components (used for crafting) without having to go to town and back just to clear your bags. The break-down feature is a life-saver, considering the scads of loot you'll see, and is one of Hellgate's best innovations. The in-game cursor is unusually laggy (though only for the cursor itself, and thankfully not for aiming) and I've been unable to correct for it, which makes a lot of the repetetive gear- and NPC-related clicking a nuisance. The crafting and item upgrade screens still need lots of tweaking to make them more user-friendly, though recent patches have made some improvements in this area. NPC dialogue, if you bother to read it, has been parsed into far too many individual screens of conversation, for no apparent reason.

The UI for chatting was abysmal at launch, and is only slightly better now. The commands need to be streamlined and, like most games, should just take a page out of WoW's sterling chat interface. More fixes for the chat UI are coming in the next patch, however, and to be fair they'd have been fairly useless before this point because the need for them simply hasn't existed. Being able to hot-link an item description directly into chat doesn't mean a whole lot when there's no real player-driven economy to speak of. So the fact that both hot-linking and an escrow house will be introduced in the same patch is a sign of good planning, even if both of these features should have been available from the get-go.

Thankfully, FSS has been releasing patches fairly frequently that have made great strides towards fixing the bug-laden, feature-light game released last Halloween. System stability, connection and graphical errors, and lost items have mostly disappeared in recent patches, and the aforementioned escrow house and improved trade are slated for release in the near future, along with PvP and new adventure areas. Stonehenge has already hit the servers and added several new tilesets, enemies, and bosses to the game. While FSS may have released a premature game with many issues, they're certainly taking customer support and their promise of new content for subscribers seriously. While early subscriber content consisted only of annoying, inventory-clogging holidays items with no real use and little of the kitschy quality that makes Christmas in Orgrimmar bearable, they've so far put those aside in favor of more pressing and substantial bonuses for the subscriber base. Whether a long-term investment like the Founder's offer will be worth it remains to be seen, but despite the above criticisms, I'm actually pretty hopeful that the game will eventually blossom into a more worthy specimen of the Diablo style.

Unfortunately, the one single, most disappointing thing about Hellgate: London is effectively unpatchable. Gameplay issues and bugs can all be removed with a little time, and ignored with a little patience. But Hellgate: London built itself up on a gritty, despairing and truly post-apocalyptic vision of a future overrun with hellspawn, and then fell flat on its face. All of the pre-release media, from the excellent E3 videos to the fanfic and silly, if fun, comics, painted a grim picture of a culture reduced to despair and violence against terrible odds. It had the makings of a compelling, if somewhat formulaic, story, and solid narrative and atmosphere can save a game from many other failings. Hellgate had all the makings of that kind of mood and atmosphere, and it fell flat on its face.

Media about even the most dire of circumstances need to have some kind of comic relief, even just a tiny bit. This is necessary to keep things from becoming overwhelmingly dreary, and it also humanizes things to some extent. But somewhere in the design process, Flagship Studios decided that comic relief wasn't enough, and seems to have retooled every quest and NPC in the game for comic overload. Worse, most of it isn't even that funny. Thankfully, the main storyline quests are much more in keeping with what you'd expect in a scorched world on the brink of destruction. And while the side-quests are a nice addition to the Diablo model, the tedious grinding is replaced by annoying NPCs with out-of-place attitudes. Almost every NPC is either flippant, a hyperbolic coward, or curiously upbeat about their grueling task du jour. Aside from destroying any sense of enjoyable and expressive mood in the game, it's just completely illogical. Unless the Cabalists are putting something in the water, there's no reason that 80% of the NPCs literally jump for joy when you complete their missions. Their world is a scorched husk, their civilization lies in ruins, and in all likelihood their entire families are dead. Why the fuck is everyone jumping for joy?

Some of the humor is genuinely funny and welcome - there's an admittedly clever reference to Joss Whedon's Angel that I even missed the first time, and the Scottish Marksman whose mission dialogue is complete gibberish is reminiscent of the wit that brought us the "You know this because you are telepathic" quest text from WoW. But for the most part, the game's humor just shoots itself in the foot. Most of it's not funny, almost none of it is appropriate, and it's the top reason the game fell short of its potential. Instead of gritty you get goofy, and instead of distracting from other, less important flaws, it just accentuates them.

Contrary to what many have said, and to what the majority of this largely negative review may indicate, the game is entirely playable. It's not stellar, and parts of it are downright annoying. But the gameplay is dead-on, and a worthy successor to the level-grinding, loot-hoarding, horde-slaughtering hole in our brains previously filled by Diablo and its clones. Hellgate: London even does enough things differently and promises enough in the future that it's not simply a Diablo clone. Tragically, though, its atmosphere and the flavor of the plotline is forgettable enough that I played through the entire game listening to podcasts and didn't really miss anything. The converse of that statement is that it's easy and casual enough that you can get into an out of it quickly, and it's a fun thing to do while listening to podcasts or DVD commentaries.