Radio Silence

It was not coincidental that I blogged about getting Dawn of War 2 and that I haven't written much since.

I'll post a more thorough evaluation later (spoiler : I think it's awesome) but I have to say, the combination of RTS + XP + Gear + Achievement Points is irresistible. It's a super group like the Justice League, only composed of game mechanics I adore.

I can't even think of anything to add that would make it better. They would have to incorporate non-game-related addictions of mine, like skim milk.

Is Ken Levine working on the next X-COM?

Evidently Ken Levine of 2K Boston (of Bioshock fame) is sitting on an enormous surprise.

There seems to be a lot of evidence pointing towards an X-COM game. 2K owns the license. Mr. Levine is a big fan of the series. He also (in the interview above) won't deny that the game is X-COM, which (likely) means that the current game is an X-COM game or there is still hope that there will be an X-COM game. Otherwise why get our hopes up by refusing to comment?

Hinterland Working Again!

Either the upgrade to Service Pack 3 or that DCO thing did the trick, Hinterland is now working again.

Yeeha! Time to play more DoW2! :)

What I've been playing: 3/16/09

I’ve been playing some new games and some old games.

Ratchet : Deadlocked

Still disappointed by this game, but I'm almost finished, and I guess it's ok. Still eagerly awaiting my planned PS3 purchase later this year -- to me it is largely a very expensive Insomniac Game Player.

Mass Effect

Haven’t played since my most recent complaint. Sara wrote in the comments that the game does not become more instructive than what I experienced. Not cool.

Crystal Defense

The aforementioned, much awaited (by me) Final Fantasy-based Tower Defense game for XBLA. Before I played it, I thought “Wow, a tower defense game on XBLA”. After I put a few hours into it, the kindest thing I can think to say about it is : “Hey, it’s a tower defense game on XBLA.”

It has that Square-Enix clunkiness we all love and/or hate. The gameplay is very, very basic. There just doesn’t seem to be much to it. It was originally an iPhone game and, in this case, I think that says a lot about the game.

Boat vs. The Virus

Found a virus on Saturday. Slept about three hours on Saturday trying to get rid of the thing. Spybot was the only software I found that could actually identify the thing, but it couldn’t manage to delete it. Eventually I found a helpful webpage that suggested booting from CD into repair mode and then lots of command line deleting. I had only found 2 or 3 infected files in windows explorer, but when I was at the command prompt and looking around I found a lot more – I ended up removing about 22 infected files.

But I’m clean now. I defeated the virus after a long amount of work. Final Score : Virus – 16, Boat -- … 1.

I’m not a professional IT person but I do have a lot of exposure being a software engineer and long-time computer nerd. Things like this always make me think : how do normal people even manage? How could I survive if I didn’t know my way around a keyboard? Of course, I imagine auto mechanics, doctors and lawyers all have similar thoughts.

Dawn Of War 2

This game was the whole justification for upgrading my computer, but I didn’t sit down to play it until last night. (I had to fix my computer then cook for the week). I told myself, “Just watch the opening vid then go to sleep.”

So naturally it started up and displayed about one frame every ten seconds.

After a weekend removing the virus it was just like the cheesiest 1980’s action movie : “Here we go again!”

So off I go, updating drivers, vainly searching for that silver bullet that will solve all my problems. For about two hours, anyway, at which point I found the silver bullet. There’s a defect in AMD’s X2 CPU’s and it does not play well with DoW2. Fortunately AMD has some software called DCO (Dual-Core Optimizer or something like that). It evidently hasn’t fixed everybody’s X2 issues, but it fixed mine.

I’ve only Dawn of War 2 for about 15 minutes before I had to go to bed but I already love the game. I loved the original and I love the universe, but Relic really outdid itself this time. Great looking graphics, great looking interface, great gameplay, I love the new advancement and gear mechanics.

It got a “Wow” from me. It’s the third “Wow” I can really remember in my long history of gaming, the previous honorees being World of Warcraft and Homeworld (another Relic game, which honestly I never completed). I say “remember” because I’m sure I also wow’d at Moria and Quake and X-Com and Starcraft and Warcraft III and the original Dawn of War and at Ratchet and Clank (both 1 and 2).

Still Playing :

Defense Grid because I love getting achievements and trying to get up the leaderboards

Team Fortress 2 because I wanted to try out my new hardware with a familiar game (Defense Grid also looks fantastic with the new video card/widescreen). I tried picking this back up a month ago and started with a medic, which was probably a mistake as it was never a class I played. I played a little bit with a heavy over the weekend – man, is that a great noob class or what?

"Electronics Skill"? What the **** is that supposed to mean?

Exercising and playing RPG's are two activities I tend to quit because they eventually become boring. I realize that many people enjoy RPG's and/or exercising and do not find them boring at all. But these people probably have some disease of which I happily remain unafflicted.

So I figure : why not combine them?

We got my wife a recumbent exercise bike recently and I decided it to give it a shot with a little help of Our Favorite Drug, the video game. It seemed most suited to a more relaxed type of game so I picked up Mass Effect, which I had briefly played (and enjoyed) previously.

So the introduction is over and I'm presented with three possible missions. I pick the first one on the list, and after some (un-tutorialed) control fidgeting I manage to pick one of the mission places and try to go there.

Only I'm stopped.

Evidently there is some mission that is way too important for me to miss, and I'm told to get down to some planet and pick up some drone, right the **** away. And why not? Why should that be hard?

So after some more frustrating (un-tutorialed) control fidgeting I land on the planet.

And I'm in a car.

It's not really a car, it's more like an APC. But I seriously had no idea that I'd ever be driving in this game. The game must as been as surprised as I was because it didn't instruct me on the controls or how I was supposed to find that bloody drone. But I managed to drive the space bus around until I found the drone. On the way I accidentally ran over some robot monkeys and became Notorious or something. Whatever. I get to the drone, and keep pressing buttons (most of which shoot the drone I'm trying to recover) until my guys get out of the car.

So I walk over to the drone, press the little button to examine it ... and the game informs me that my "Electronics Skill" is too low. I did not know I even had something called an "Electronics Skill", but evidently I do, and it is totally inadequate for drone examination.

Now, I'm hoping -- Hoping -- that somehow I got off the beaten track, and when I do the **correct** mission first I'll get all sorts of helpful tutorials on how to drive and find mission objectives, an act which will be no doubt rendered useless by a wide variety of inadequate skills.

But regardless, Bioware : Come On. If you're going to make an MMORPG you need to do way better than this.

Broken Games 2, New Hardware 0

I've had a lot of problems with broken games lately. Hinterland and Dawn of War: Soulstorm have both crapped out on me in the past couple of months. Not to mention that Dawn of War II wouldn't even run on my ancient video card.

But I had a solution.

I ordered a new video card (and a new power supply and new monitor) and hoped, as a nice side effect, that these two games would start working again.

Thwarted!

Finally a Tower Defense Game for Xbox Live Arcade

[EDIT: An Updated List of Tower Defense Games on Xbox Live Arcade!]

I'm a tower defense junkie and I've been thrilled at their recent transition to retail. I've been a bit bummed though, because while I'm hanging out with all my tower-defenseless Xbox Live games, the Wii and the PS3 both have some neat tower defense games.

No more, I guess. Crystal Defenders (from Square Enix, no less) is coming to XBLA this week. Yeeha.

That reminds me, I need to write my definitive article on why FFXI is so awful. It will be titled "Final Fantasy XI : The MMORPG That Hates You Back".

The Latest Greatest TF2 Cheat

Talking to a co-worker the other day. He said that there's a mod for Team Fortress 2 servers that gives you every single achievement as soon as you log in. This gives you access to all the neat new weapons you can get from having the achievements.

Anyway, the co-worker had a friend that logged in to one of these servers and instantly got every achievement. Valve detected that he had cheated, probably by seeing that he got every single achievement at the same time.

So what did Valve do? They suspended him for an entire week.

At the end of the week he came back to his TF2 account -- with every achievement still achieved and therefore every weapon unlocked.

Do Bands Troll For Guitar Hero Cred?

I was listening to one of the new Metallica songs a few months ago (on the radio, I hate Metallica) and noticed some gratuitous thrashing during the song. I forget the other song, but I'd heard another song by another band doing the same thing recently.

Do you think bands are starting to add random crazy guitar into their songs just to get Guitar Hero cred for having a super-hard song?

Gears of War 2 and the Perks Gap

In late 2007 Epic released the latest version of the FPS that build their modern day operations upon -- Unreal Tournament 3.

It didn't do too well.

For all the bells and whistles that Epic had added to the franchise, it still seemed like the same shooter we'd been playing for the past eight years. I was surprised at the time, but in retrospect failure seemed inevitable -- it released the same month as Call of Duty 4, and a month after Team Fortress 2, two FPS heavyweights even today.

It seems unlikely that we'll ever see another Unreal Tournament proper (although they are planning an expansion on UT3). That time has come and gone. But it's important in another way -- we have seen Epic stick to their aging guns even when it means killing off a beloved franchise.

Enter Gears of War.

If it weren't for Gears I don't know that Epic would still be a development studio. As hard as UT has fell, Gears has thrived.

Except that once again, an Epic game feels a little old. Let us briefly consider the other major shooters around today. I'm probably missing one (or many), but here they are : CoD4, CoD:WaW, Killzone 2, Team Fortress 2, Halo 3, Gears of War 2, and Left 4 Dead. You'll also may notice that the first four games have some sort of "perks" system, while the last three do not. If you take into consideration that Halo 3 is a year older than Gears 2, and that Left 4 Dead centers around match play, Gears 2 is suddenly the only modern major shooter without perks.

Castle Crashers and Bad Achievements

Castle Crashers is a good game that would have been great with better achievements. I've been thinking about bad achievements today because I made it about halfway through Penny Arcade Adventures 2 (On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness) before I got my very first achievement ...

Anyway, Castle Crashers is a brawler for Xbox Live Arcade and it's quite good. If you haven't tried it out I'd highly recommend the demo. Sadly, the achievements are not quite all they could be. Let us ponder the larger problems.

Obvious Progression / Collection Achievements Missing

Castle Crashers does have a good progression achievement : beat the game and you get an achievement. That's great. It also has a good collection achievement : collect all the pets and get an achievement. Also great.

But that's it. On top of pets, there are also a bunch of weapons to collect. No achievements for that. You can also unlock a bunch of characters, but there are no achievements for that, either. In fact, you can beat the game in a higher difficulty and level your character to max (level 80) and you'll get an achievement for neither.

Achievements should guide players through all of the game, not just part of it.

Too many skill/stunt achievements

Another good thing overdone. Skill achievements and stunt achievements ("skillfully do something unusual") are also good inclusions in your game -- but in moderation! Using seven of your twelve achievements on skills and stunts is a bridge too far, and a dozen bridges too far when you only used one achievement to cover the entirety of game progression.

Exploration Achievements Should Not Be The Hardest Achievements In Your Game

Aside from progression, collection, skill, and stunt achievements, you also need to guide the player around the features of the game -- what I would call exploration achievements.

Castle Crashers actually has a really great exploration achievement:

Treasure Hunter (20)
Find and dig up 10 buried items.

This is "guiding" the player do dig up treasure, something they might not try out otherwise. That is perfect. And that brings us to these monstrosities :

Arena Master (15)
Win 40 arena ranked matches.

Glork (15)
Win 20 all you can quaff ranked matches.

It's perfectly appropriate to use achievements to guide players to these features. "Look players -- you can PvP! And check out our "Summer Games" style button mashing contest!" That would have been great. But instead it is not great, it is awful.

Forty ranked arena PvP) matches? Forty? For a silly little brawler? Really? How many people are really going to spend a night or three just doing arena to get these forty wins?

And that's a masterpiece next to "Glork". I can do Glork once, pounding away at the buttons poorly, and then my wrists are too sore to continue. And I have to win twenty of these to get an achievement?

Instead of showing the player around the game, these achievements will just make players want to get some friends together and boost their way through.