Kinect vs Wii
It would seem that Nintendo did something right when they brought out the Wii. Their competition after a couple of years of dragging their feet, reluctantly followed suit and brought out their own versions of the motion game. Sony introduced the PlayStation Move, and Microsoft added the Kinect to their Xbox range.
The idea is to detect the movements of the player to complete different tasks. You can’t just sit and tap your fingers against the screen or controller like in Angry Birds, partypoker or Call of Duty. The motion sensors have certainly done well in the sales. Which is superior though? Lets look at the Kinect and Wii.
Nintendo Wii
One of the biggest challenges Nintendo had was making sure the players had to move during the game. We soon worked out that you could still gain a good score without all that much effort though. You can flick your wrist and be just as successful.
By bringing out the Wii Remote Plus controller, the Wii evolved and requires more movement now. However not every Wii player was going to go back and buy the superior controller. On the plus side the sensor for the Wii is not an ugly feature in the living room, thanks to its minuscule stature.
Microsoft Xbox Kinect
The wonder of the Kinect is that unlike the Wii, you don’t need a controller. If you want to pick a category on screen, you hold your arm up. It feels like a novelty sci-fi gag at times, but you can’t deny its superiority in terms of active fitness games. Women are likely to buy Dance Central or the Zumba game to exercise at home.
The downside is the size of the motion detector. It’s larger to aid movement detection, but it’s bulky on top or just below your television. On the plus side you don’t have to unplug the Kinect when you play regular Xbox 360 games.
Overall the Kinect seems to win, although both have their merits and Nintendo certainly have more experience behind them. Who knows what they’ll create for the Wii next.
Father
“But there is one thing you must know… I am your father!”
“This suit is impervious to everything, except for conveniently placed lava crystals!”
Seriously. Saints Row 3. Go play it.
It’s AWESOME!
And you (might) know how rare it is for me to say this about a game. Very little about it bothers me. From the very first moments of the intro until the final moments of the game, it’s one giant ball of goodness topped up with an extra big load of juicy awesome.
Seriously. Why are you still reading this? Go play it!
Skyrim
I used to wait like a month between writing two blog posts. Then I took an arrow in the knee.
Or maybe, it had more to do with a temporary lack of inspiration and a general not feeling like writing something. I don’t know. Either way, I’m going like crazy – this is the second post that is actually being queued up when I’m writing it (this is when I set it not to publish immediately but some time in the future, in this case, a week in between posts so that I don’t burn through material too quickly – up until now I’ve never done this, actually).
Anyway, I used to play Skyrim, like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.
Or maybe, it had more to do with the fact that I got fed up with it.
Don’t get me wrong. I played Morrowind for waaaay too many hours, and loved it. I played Oblivion waaaaaaay too much, and I loved it. And in many ways, I love Skyrim, but in some ways…
To start off positively, Bethesda is still a major champion in terms of open-world RPGs. I just love to be able to say, screw you fate of the world, I’m going home, or somewhere else, and do whatever it is I like to do next. A big world with lots of places to visit, plenty of NPCs to talk to, lots of side quests (and often pretty good ones too, not the overly generic ‘go drop off/pick up this item’ or ‘talk to this guy’ and you’re done), and so on is something that I appreciated back in Skyrim’s predecessors, and I can certainly appreciate it a lot in Skyrim.
Compared to Oblivion, the main quest (or, as far as I got with it) is much better. Oblivion’s main quest sits in memory as being very repetitive: you have to close a bunch of Oblivion gates, and each of them is pretty much the same. It’s uninteresting, to say the least. There’s more to the game than that of course, but it kinda sticks. Skyrim does a way better job at it.
But as great a game as Skyrim can be, it lacks. It’s pretty good, but it just misses on the final details, the finishing touches, the last little bits that would have made it really great.
The engine, for instance. Things like their Radiant AI and such are awesome (in short, NPCs wander around, they go to their homes and sleep and go somewhere else to work, stuff like that – they have lives, rather than just standing at their shop or wandering the same bit of street for all eternity), but in other details, Bethesda could have paid a little bit more attention. For instance, when you swim underwater, the screen gets a sort of color overlay to show that hey, this is underwater, it’s more difficult to see here. Which is great, except that it suddenly appears when the camera is submerged under water a certain amount (and up until that point you can see underwater as clear as you can see above it). This flaw dates back to at least Morrowind, and back then it was perfectly acceptable for a game, but in 2011, I think they should be able to do better.
The game’s controls are horrible. You get used to it, and once you do it’s managable, the controls are very annoying and un-intuitive. They are console-controls on a PC, but mapped to the wrong keys. Not great.
Then, bugs. Especially with a game that is as big and complicated as Skyrim is, there’s bound to be a couple of glitches now and then. If I ran accross such a glitch when doing some obscure side-quest I wouldn’t mind that much and just carry on. The thing is, I had several major problems with the main quest. One NPC’s dialogue was missing (apparantly a very common problem, you have to use some tool and unpack a datafile to fix this – the NPC is quite important and without doing this, he says nothing, you have no idea to what you’re responding, and all dialogue involving him gets terribly bugged). Several times I had to resort to using the console to get past a point that was impossible to complete by playing normally. In a sidequest, I can understand, but having several of these issues in the main quest…
It actually got to the point where I just got tired with having to switch back and forth to a web-browser (which reminds me: it doesn’t handle alt-tab’ing well, which is pretty much unacceptable for a 2011 release, if you ask me) in an attempt to find a workaround for some game-breaking issue in the main quest. As a result I just shut the game down and decided I was done with it.
Bethesda, did you test your game? At all?
(I used to be a playtester like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee. Yeah.)
Another thing – which has evolved into a bit of an internet meme. All of the guards in Skyrim have a small combined pool of lines that they’ll say if the player gets nearby. It turns out that a lot of the guards in Skyrim used to be an adventurer, until their fate brought an arrow on to a collission course with their knee. It’s fine the first time you hear this line. After hearing it from five different guards…
Well. Yeah.
My overall thoughts on Skyrim: it’s good. In many ways, its pretty damn good. But with a little bit more effort, it would have been so much better.
And now, back to playing Tetris.
Game of Lies
I’ve been bored a bit, recently. And what website do people go to when they’re bored?
Exactly. Facebook.
Yeah, I know Facebook is a piece of privacy-unfriendly crap (in friendly terms), and personally, I don’t really use it anyway. But it has games, and those games tend to be kind of addictive, and marginally entertaining.
One game I’ve been playing a lot (and getting quite good at) is Tetris Battle. For those educated folks who aren’t familiar with it: it’s tetris, except that you play it against other people. In the basic variant, you play against a single other person, and your goal is to knock the opponent out (ie, making his playing field fill up so that he can’t place any new blocks). To do this, you clear lines yourself, which puts ‘garbage’ lines at the bottom of the opponent’s playing field. If you receive those garbage lines yourself, there’s one block in that line, of you place another block yourself that touches that particular block, the garbage line clears away. There’s also a four-player variant, where the goal is to clear 40 lines as fast as you can.
Anyway. You’re supposed to be playing against other players. If you have friends on Facebook who play it, you can invite them so you can play against eachother. But other than that, the game is a load of bullcrap. You’re not playing against actual people at all.
Well, you probably see the names, profile pictures and actual statistics of people who are really on Facebook and really play it, but you’re not actually playing against them at the moment. The game obviously doesn’t say this, but there are a bunch of things that give it away.
- First of all, timezones. I’ve played hundreds of games, and lots of them against Asian people. Which is fine, except that most of the time when I’m playing, it’s something like 4 AM over in China.
- Pausing. I can pause the game anytime, and either I have to resume it within 30 seconds, or it continues automatically. I occasionally pause the game to write a message on some instant messaging program or to do some other quick task. In my hundreds of games, it has never happened that the opposing player paused the game.
- Starting the game. Typically, for a multiplayer game, all players have to indicate that they are ready before the game actually starts. However, every time when I click the ‘START’ button, the game starts instantly. This would require that the other player has already clicked ‘START” himself as well (which is unlikely, since I’ve never had to wait for ANY of my 500+ games), or that his START button is grayed out and the game just starts when I click START (which would mean that on occassion I would have to wait for the other player to start the game, which also, never happened).
- In addition to #3, the opposite player appears to have infinite patience. It doesn’t matter if I start the game directly, or wait half an hour. He’ll just sit there and wait until I’ve started.
- Depending on their rank, players invariably use the exact same tactics and perform about equally well. Every single rank 20 or higher opponent that I’ve faced so far uses the same technique where you first build up a lot of blocks in about three quarters of the width of the playing field, and then quickly clear all those lines, so that the opponent receives a lot of garbage lines very quickly. They do this without any variation, and they are always players at rank 20 or above. Players below rank 20 never use it.
- Similarly, in the four player games, it very frequently happens that one or two of the opponents play so incredibly slow and incredibly poorly that it’s a miracle that they ever got to the rank they appear to be on at all. If they play all their games like that, they should hardly have been able to get past rank 5 or 10.
- Regardless of how poor your internet connection is at the moment, or how much stuff you’re downloading at the time, the game never has any lag while you’re playing it (or at least, not unless you play against friends).
In short, the game is a fraud. Unless you actually invite friends to play against you, you just see some random player’s name and picture and the rest is all artificial.
Freelancing
Why are there so few good space-based games around?
This is a question I’ve asked myself over and over. A couple weeks back, I did a playthrough of Freelancer for the third time. Freelancer is kind of dated, but it’s still one of the few really good space games there are (plus flying inside a Dyson sphere near the end is just awesome). It has many flaws (they actually referred to slowing down a spacehip (whilst in space) as braking. Ugh!), but there’s nothing quite like it.
Then we have Sins of a Solar Empire. A really awesome real-time strategy game. Unlike most RTS’es, which take place on relatively tiny pieces of land commanding a few hundred units on the battlefield at best (which, compared to any real war, is absolutely nothing), SoaSE takes place in space. We’re not conquering a village, we’re conquering planets. Or solar systems, if you’re playing on a large map (and you are very patient). You get to build pretty big fleets of starships and send them out to level out an entire enemy planet. And then do it again a couple more times. It too, has its flaws (for starters, I always tend to make really really big games with huge maps and lots of players and end up never finishing the game because it takes at least a couple of days to do so) but damn it is awesome.
But that doesn’t take away the fact that there are so few of these awesome space games. For once, I’d love to see a really good game, without the flaws that the current ones have. A few thoughts:
- Please, please, please, bother to read up on some basic physics. There is no such thing as ‘braking’ in space. Or a speed limit (except for the speed of light, of course) – there’s just a maximum rate of acceleration/deceleration.
- Continuing on the first point, planets kind of tend to move around a star. It is incredible how often this is forgotten. In Freelancer, there are ‘trade lanes’ between planets – ring-like structures that facilitate reasonably fast travel. In reality, these are completely unfeasible due to planets rotating around their star at different relative speeds. The same goes for whatever the mechanism in SoaSE is called.
Also, distance between the planet and star vs. the planet being habitable. The distance is a really big factor in the surface temperature of the planet, and thus, its habitability. Planets with acceptable temperatures don’t generally occur close to, or far away from, a star. - Likewise, it is astonishing how often it is forgotten that space is just really really big. In Freelancer, you can fly a circle around a planet in about a minute or so. And planets, for some reason, are only one or two kilometers in diameter. In the real world, a two kilometer rock in space is hardly more than a pebble. Not to mention the distance between planets being no more than about 20 or 30 kilometers.
When I’m looking at a planet from the bridge of a ship, I want to go ‘oh crap, that’s a big rock’. When I look at the distance to the next closest planent, I want to go ‘oh crap, that’s a long way’. - Also, being a little bit reasonable when it comes to building and landing ships wouldn’t hurt. Building huge ships on the ground and launching them into space (or landing them on a planet) is just not feasible; their mass would require enormous amounts of energy to propel into orbit. Instead, space elevators to transport people and material into orbit are the way to go, with shipbuilding/maintenance/docking facilitiets on orbit. Elevators provide a cheap and efficient way of transporting stuff back and forth; launching something into space by other means is (or landing) is really difficult. Likewise, launching or landing is a difficult manouver that takes time. In Freelancer, I’m pretty sure I heard the phrase “see you in space in a few minutes”. Make that at least an hour (even assuming launching right then and there is possible).
- Randomly generated non-player controlled traffic is fine. But when I encounter a trade convoy that claims to be hauling oxygen from a space station to a terrestial planet…
- And finally, a spaceship (especially one that never lands) really has no practical use for wings. Sure, they can be used as weapon mount points or something like that, but generally speaking, aerodynamic surfaces will not do you much good in a (near) vacuum.
We could go on like this for a while, but yeah. You get the idea 
Sleep at Night
Really, Notch?
Someone clearly doesn’t understand how software development works.
Dragon Age 2
I’ve been busy a little bit. Dragon Age 2 came out recently.
Unfortunately, as hard as I try, it just doesn’t compare to Origins. I should note that I havn’t completed Dragon Age 2 yet, but the storyline… It takes a very long time getting up to speed. For what I suppose is roughly the first half of the game, it remains entirely unclear what the big picture is. Sure, there’s a guy, he fled from Ferelden during the Blight and tries to get by in Kirkwall, and that’s a great starting point, but the big picture is completely absent. Even after a while, you’ve suddenly become the Champion of Kirkwall, and eh, great, now what? The whole sense of purpose and being part of this epic adventure that you have in Origins is entirely absent (and besides, after defeating an archdemon in Origins, Dragon Age 2 will have to do a hell of a job to match in that area).
The thing that has been bothering me endlessly is the environment. Origins has a huge world, there are tons of different places to explore, different cities, you name it, but Dragon Age 2 is just Kirkwall and a few minor areas just outside of it. The city feels more like a fortress than like a group of buildings which happen to form a city – even in the less expensive regions – and it quickly becomes boring having to walk through it. The endless and highly obvious re-use of areas (there are a high number of buildings that only vary in which NPCs are roaming in them and which doors you can open) is a major disappointment compared to Origins, and tears down the immersion factor, which is so crucial to a good RPG.
Quests (and individual tasks within them) are way too often ‘walk to person X on the other end of the city, talk for 30 seconds, and come back’, which quite frankly is not encouraging to do a lot of sidequests. I also miss the interaction with your companions that you have in Origins. In Origins, you can just start a conversation with any of your companions at pretty much any time, and really get a chance to explore their backstories and get a sense of bonding with them. Aside from a few pre-arranged conversations at fixed moments, this is entirely absent in DA2, which I think is a shame.
In terms of combat, it’s a shame that spells like Tempest aren’t nearly as impressive as they were in Origins. Complete lack of friendly fire turns spellcasting more into mindless targeting rather than actually having to be strategic about it – it really doesn’t matter if your entire party is within the target area of a Fireball. Combat is pretty easy anyway, most of the enemies go down quickly and hardly pose a challenge (with some exceptions, like the Qunari leader dude, whose difficulty really seems out of proportion to the rest of the game when you duel him). The times at which you’ll get attacked are easily predictable, and very often you’ll run into guys that just storm you on sight for no explainable reason.
Even though I can understand their absence, the different origin stories on DA:O were fun and I’d like to have seen something like that return in DA2.
I am still going to complete the game, and will probably play DA2′s sequel as well, but I’m sad to say it’s nowhere near as good as Dragon Age: Origins is, and I’ll be looking forward to Bethesda’s new toy, Skyrim.
Starcraft 2
I’m not at all a big gamer. I enjoy the occasional game (usually leading to ‘oh crap, it’s 5 AM already?’ moments), but I don’t play a whole lot. But, after all the buzz surrounding it, I wanted to check out Starcraft 2.
I only played the campaign. I usually get kicked big time in multiplayer so I’m not even bothering to try that.
Anyway, I have to say, the campaign is fun to play. The story isn’t particularly good or revolutionary (and pretty predictable), but it serves its purpose of sending you in a direction where you can blow stuff up. (Yay for blowing stuff up.) What I do like is how the campaign is done: usually in an RTS the campaign is linear: you have to do mission A, then mission B, then mission C, repeat until end. In Starcraft 2 you get to pick what you want to do when, and not everything is mandatory. Doing missions does however grant you more types of units, allows you to purchase permanent upgrades for your forces, and there is the research thing which makes things interesting as well.
Most missions are the same in the basic turn of events – ie you go somewhere, you build a base, train forces, attack (or defend) something, and ‘lo and behold, the mission succeeded. It does not however feel repetitive to do so, which is obviously a good thing. Several missions have interesting twists to them – one for instance (and don’t read this if you don’t want a spoiler) involves a wall of fire, caused by a sun about to go nova, that slowly moves accross the maps and forces you to push onwards and relocate your base several times over. This relies on the interesting (though realistically speaking, completely absurd) possibility of letting most of the building in your base take off, fly somewhere else, and land again. You’ll need to rebuild a few structures after each relocation but most can be moved that way.
The campaign plot is pretty generic. Rogue hero fights against evil empire to free the people (and of course the inevitable element of rescueing a long lost girlfriend), slowly gets to his goal, after gaining some sort of a foothold comes the ever-present inspiring speech after which the troops march into almost certain doom and succeed againt all odds. The girlfriend of course is saved, the old friend who betrayed the hero is killed, and they all happily watched the credits roll over the screen.
While the campaign is fun to play, the core of the game is similar to pretty much every other RTS that’s out there. You’ve got the technologically mediocre humans who, of course, are the big good guys who rule over most of the galaxy, there’s the mysterious ancient alien race with expensive but strong units, and the guys that rely on hordes of weak units to flood their way to whatever their goal is. The game mechanics are fairly uninspiring but they work well and do provide a good couple of hours worth of time-spending.
One thing I do love big time is the mech unit called ‘Thor’. Like most mech units it is entirely unrealistic, but it’s voice sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger and it has some of the more awesome quotes I’ve heard from RTS-game-units in a while. It bothers me that it is not really THAT powerful and you need a bunch of them to really do anything, even though it is supposed to be based of Odin, a really giant mech that pretty much vaporizes anything (where did he go after the broadcast tower mission, anyway?), but the line ‘I am here, click me!’ easily makes up for that. Most of the other units’ speech is less interesting (and especially in case of the marines, starts to annoy really quickly), but who listens to that anyway.
Overall I’ve so far found Starcraft 2 to be enjoyable, but to say that it’s a big revolution that was really worth waiting so many years for… ?
No, not really.
Dragons
Today I read that Bioware officially announced Dragon Age 2, sequal to Dragon Age: Origins. Yay!
I’m quite excited about this. I really liked DO:A (and hence did two playthroughs, despite the amount of time it takes to get through the storyline). Even though in some cases I got the feeling that everything was deliberately made more difficult to lengthen the game rather than to add something to the overall storyline, it’s one of only a few games that managed to really grasp my attention in the last year or so. So that is pretty damn good.
DA:O Awakening (the expansion) was good too – rather short compared to the original campaign, but definately enjoyable!
And to all people who whine about how there is too much dialogue and interacting with NPCs and having to deal with the storyline:
That’s the whole f*cking point of an RPG.
If you don’t like dialogue, then go play a shooter or something. Or Pong. I don’t care.
Mass Effect 2
I’ve enjoyed playing the first Mass Effect game a while back, and just finished Mass Effect 2.
The short version?
I like it! Possibly better than the first, although I was kinda disappointed that only such a small section of the citadel is accessible.
Which leads me to the one thing that did bother me throughout the game… Like so many other games, it suffers from what I call the Pokémon effect. Every object, every character, every place you encounter is there for a reason. Aside from general things like NPCs that run a store, EVERY character you can actually talk to or who makes remarks you pass by, is there for one assignment or another. Every door, corridor and room exists for a specific reason, and more annoyingly, nearly every object placed in those rooms as well. Specifically I’m referring to objects that can be used as cover during a firefight (or objects that can be used to your (dis)advantage, such as the explosive containers), because those kinds of objects are only found in the locations where you will be fighting, and just by looking what objects there are ahead of you makes it really easy to predict if/when you’ll be attacked. Also the game world is very linear; yes, you can fly your ship around in between missions, but once you’re on a mission there is only the correct way a head and every other path is conveniently blocked by stacks of crates, a door that cannot be opened, or debris (except for the occasional sideroom that’s got a few goodies you can pick up).
A good example of a game that doesn’t have this problem would be Oblivion. For instance, there are lots of houses you can visit, with one or more people living in them, that aren’t of any real significance. Occasionally you need them for a quest, but otherwise they’re just decoration (yes, you can rob them or use them as food if you become a vampire, but otherwise). Even during a quest you’re mostly free to move as you like rather than being forced along one specified route.
The tons of voiced dialogue and voice acting were outstanding, and is something I can really appreciate in a game. They could have come up with a few more lines for teammates to shout during combat though; when you hear the same lines five times over during each firefight, they tend to get boring (even annoying) quickly.
Nevertheless – Pokémon effect aside, I can definately recommend ME2. Oh, and this time around I am going to make sure I keep the save game to import it into the 3rd installment of the Mass Effect games