Game Curmudgeons

Look what you’ve all done to Steam. Look at it!

This is what happens when the hottest titles on Steam go on sale for ridiculous prices. Hell, even the ones you’ve never heard of. “What is this “The Pipe?” Adventure game…looks European. A little odd. How much is it? $1.24? Shit, sold!”

It’s a Steam sale again, and just like the January sale this one is utter madness. One day sales, deep discounts, and all the best games for bottom barrel prices. Telltale Complete packs for $50, THQ complete packs for the same, 33% off anything Ubisoft.

Say goodbye to your money.

Microsoft seems to be dropping the ball on this one. The most recent Xbox update provided the ability for players to save their gamertags to a USB drive, a great idea for those who play on the go since tag recovery can take an hour easily. Unfortunately within a few days, people figured out how to hack the files to change their displayed names (often to something spectacularly racist), or even unlocking additional prestige levels in Call of Duty. Live had been reasonably free of hacking thanks to the closed nature of the system, but a good idea has gone horribly wrong quick.

Unlike hardware hacks, this isn’t such an easy detection, and I’ve seen no official comment on the problem. Here’s hoping Ryan Treit, aka Treit and True, addresses the problem or Mircrosoft expands the mod teams to deal with this. Most of the gamertag hackers, afterall, just can’t seem to resist flaunting it via colorful display names or ones using system symbols.

Disclaimer: This review is based entirely on extensive demo play, which showcases the most important part of the game, the actual game. I have no knowledge of in depth season, career, and other modes.

You know what’s fun? Baseball.

Okay, well…it’s fun to play. And for a long time there were fun baseball video games on consoles, each of which managed the complicated structure in different ways. The Atari 2600′s Super Challenge Baseball had one button and a joystick, but everyone knew to hold a direction during the pitch to influence the ball, and the simple “point and click” method worked for throwing the ball.

Possibly the best baseball interface of all time, intuitive, simple, and effective, Intellivision’s Major League Baseball. Batting and bunting on the side buttons was simple, and fielding was even easier. Every position had its own key on the 12 key pad, correlating right to where it should be on the field. Control runners simply by pointing with the disc. Easy stuff.

Later consoles with fewer buttons would go back toward point and click, but add pitching options. Tommy Lasorta would put his name on a fair share of games, and we’d even go into sci-fi with Super Baseball 2020.

And yet like so many games, baseball has had trouble making the transition to the third dimension. The addition of swing locations really threw a wrench into things, but it started to get worked out by World Series Baseball 2k2. Mostly the challenge was making pitches visible enough for players to read, without becoming more obvious than they would be in reality. Anyone who’s spent 2 minutes at a batting cage knows hitting a ball is hard, but hey, if we can make reliable hail mary passes in football games we should be able to hit a fastball.

So now we’re 10 years past the first baseball game of the modern era. We’ve had the arcadey titles and the sim titles now, and the latest among them is The Show, Sony’s series. 2010 is freshly out now, and…well, it’s a downgrade.

The simplest way to put it is that it’s too inconsistent. What you do, what the AI does, what the crowd does, how the ball moves. Maybe I’m wrong here, but sports games should be past the RPG stage, and that’s just where The Show is.

At the plate or on the mound it’s obvious that there’s dice rolling going on under the hood. Sometimes a pitch goes wild for no reason. Not just a little, a fastball, dead center at moderate speed released at the sweet spot, will shoot far off to the side. Pitching also suffers from a poorly designed meter. The confidence meter is a good idea, as is the variably sized sweet spot. The problem comes in the form of the speed being very inconsistent. Speeding the meter up or down as a whole to show being shaken, exhausted, or somehow affected is fine, but the wind up and the release speeds can vary tremendously. The system is a three press system. Once to start, once to set a speed, once for the release point. Simple, it’s like most golf games. Meter goes up, set power, meter goes down, release.

But the release can be three times as fast as the windup, completely disabling the ability of a player to get any sort of timing down. Naturally, the AI pitchers are unaffected.

There’s also the apparent use of batting averages to determine just how bit someone’s swing influence is, but it’s never properly shown. The size of the representative circle doesn’t change, but players with a high average will often swing well outside of the zone players aim for, to the extent that a completely missed swing, if player influence is any factor, can be a home run.

Now, it’s expected the stats of the real players are a factor, but they’re only that, a factor. A player making bad plays should pay the price, and vice versa for good plays. It just never seems to work that way, though. Throws routinely go high for players, runners stumble, fielders drop a ball. There’s a real bias toward the AI in The Show, particularly in terms of the umpire calling strikes. It’s even more obvious with the power hitters, who get clear favoritism from umpires, at least on the AI team.

None of this is helped by the awful controls for baserunning, or how non-responsive the swing controls feel. There’s also the poorly thought-out mechanic for swing checking, where you simply let go of the button. Sounds great, but in a video game where you can’t really see the proper depth or direction of a pitch, or where we’re used to just tapping the button to swing, it results in a lot of strikes or a lot of unchecked swings that you wanted to stop.

Stealing bases, going for extra, or just leading off, all of those require odd combinations of buttons and stick presses, easily done improperly or just not quickly enough to save a play. So you set the baserunning to automatic, but that results in players often NOT running when they should because of AI errors.

The camera angles just never quite work for the batter. It needs to be up or down a little to provide some idea of depth perception, rather than memorizing the timing of a pitch. They also never work for the fielding, often switching to an angle that reveals where a ball is going too late to react properly. The fielder selected is often counter-intuitive, leaving players to turn on assisted or automatic fielding. Another part of the game slips away from their control.

The sad statement of MLB 10:The Show is that it’s at it’s best when players do the least. If it played the whole game itself it’d be pretty damn good, but frustrating batting and pitching, the core of the game, just provide too much trouble. The fielding is fine when it’s working as it should, but when something goes wrong, and it often does, it’s just a frustration.

There are, of course, bugs aplenty, usually related to clipping planes. The screen behind the plate to save fans from getting a Liberace blocks balls (this website is classy) and nothing else. A pop-up foul straight back can go up and over the screen, dropping back right behind it, where most of us would call it “out of play.” But not The Show, or the catcher, who can and will stick his gloved arm right through the screen. Does he go through a gap at the bottom? Does he have superhuman powers to allow himself to shrink his arm to fit through the wire mesh? Does he have superhuman strength? Judging by the throws he’s made to stop a base stealer, I’m going to go with the shrinking thing.

Players routinely run through each other, both teammates and opponents. I’d complain about umpires, but to be fair they’re supposed to be out of the way. Still, for a simulation, once in a a while one should take that hit. The home plate ump does sometimes, but apparently it’s based on a forcefield he wears. Replays reveal that the ball’s impact on players, umps, bats, and fences is around three or four inches away from the actual object. Maybe everything is actually made of rare earth metals, it’s just a magnetic effect we’re seeing. That would make sense, right?

There are plenty of miscellaneous complaints to be had, really. Players don’t look like their real life counterparts, the animations are terrible to mediocre, particularly when it comes to errors, and there’s absolutely no clipping planes in the game. Balls often move right through the backs or sides of gloves to be caught. Sometimes they even make 90 degree turns to the left, moving two feet into Jeter’s hand, clearly visible both live and in the replay.

Balls will bounce through the fans, be that the fans leaning over the fence to catch a foul or the ones in the stands. No kidding. It just passes through them. Sometimes a ball can hop over the fence on a bounce and nobody moves at all, but the ball bounces like it’s hitting a trampoline. Again, I’m going with the “rare earth supermagnets” theory here.

When players are angry, they all look exactly the same. Their noses flatten like they’re shihtzus, they all have a kind of snouty-pig look, and appear to stretch and become two-dimensional, which is a constant problem with the game’s FOV anyway. Some players look like middle-aged men for no apparent reason.

The real shame is that at first, the game is fun. And sometimes there’s an urge to play, but not at the price of buying in. The demo is long enough and provides enough content to just play it. At least that way when a bug causes you to lose you didn’t pay for it and long term, it doesn’t really matter. It’s fun for about 30-45 minutes, maybe for 8 innings (aka, two full demo plays), but after that, it’s just gotten frustrating.

It is, ultimately, less of a sports sim and more of a baseball RPG given the constant stat-checking under the hood and the fact it’s better to just let most functions automate. There’s plenty of bells and whistles and extra touches. It’s nice to have the replays, the player reactions, the fully realized stadiums, but with the core game having the deep flaws it does, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a budget title promoted as a flagship.

Coming up later today, a review of Major League Baseball: The Show 2010, a PS3 exclusive. Hint-It’s got problems.

Right now, Portal is free! If you’re not familiar, 70 game of the year awards, 3 hours or so, rioutously funny. And it’s free, so what’s your excuse? Get it here.

Mount and Blade: Warband has a spectacular addition to the combat of the first.

Kicking.

This doesn’t seem like a huge deal at first, but when you’re locked blade to blade in close combat, it can give you the space you need to swing a bigger weapon, or get a good thrust.

Or you could be like me and accidentally drop your two handed sword in the last round of a tournament facing an opponent on horseback with a lance. Which sounds like a recipe for disaster, of course. But it wasn’t.

I got off my horse, let him run into a corner, and buddy, I kicked that horse hard. I kicked and kicked until it buckled as my foe launched thrust after thrust, unable to hit me. He hit the ground and started dodging, using his superior speed as best he could, but I wouldn’t give him a target. He’d wind up, and I’d step to the inside, around the lance, and I’d fucking KICK.

I kicked him into a corner of the arena, mercilessly delivering boot after boot to the nethers.

It was a drawn out battle, and he landed a few true strikes between the weak blunt taps at face to face range, but was almost completely unable to use his weapon.

If Mount and Blade: Warband had a crowd, it would have been cheering. Women would have been throwing handkerchiefs and, dare I say it, entire corsets at me.

Wercheg would have erected a bronze statue in my honor. It would show me in mid-kick, steel booted foot in the air. My opponent’s face was hidden by his helmet, but his eyes would show terror and pain, a confusion as to how he started in this noblest of tournaments and ended up in a world without dignity. His spear would be thrust outward, under my arm, effectively harmless. His shield facing down, but unable to lower enough to protect him.

It would be inscribed as such.

“HERE STANDS MONUMENT TO THE GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS OF SLASH OF CALADRIA, WHO FELL KING RAGNAR IN THE FINAL ROUND OF THE GRAND TOURNAMENT OF WERCHEG WITH NAUGHT BUT THE SOLES OF HIS FEET AND THE ENDLESS DETERMINATION OF THE HEROES OF LORE. FROM NOW UNTIL THE END OF TIME SHALL HIS EXPLOITS BE KNOWN, UNTIL THE LORD GOD DOES END THE WORLD SHALL CODPIECES WITHER AND FOLD MERELY BY HIS PRESENCE.”

It’s really, really disappointing.

God of War has declined since the first title, which only really had the flaws of repetition and the Hades sections.

God of War III has a lot of flaws and a few shining moments, ending up closer to Dante’s Inferno than God of War.

Graphically, there’s no question of the quality. And that may be the biggest flaw. So much is going on at all times on-screen that Kratos disappears into the middle of it, it ends up being difficult to tell just what’s going on sometimes. There’s not enough truly defined outlines, maybe an artificial outline should have been added. A little specular shading and rim lighting, for example, as used in Team Fortress 2 would have provided clear definition against the backgrounds and enemies that isn’t there.

It does manage spectacle at an unrivaled level, in gross detail. Everything about the game’s fights is huge. Kratos swings big swords in a 30 foot radius, the enemies he fights are 30 to 300 feet tall, and the methods of dispatch are nothing short of gruesome.

Unfortunately, the game itself falls to the spectacle. Combat isn’t solid, it’s loose and repetitive, button mashing being as advantageous as any strategy. There’s no sense of actual contact with an enemy, blades just spin in circles regardless of what they hit. Walls, blocking enemies, the sun, it doesn’t really seem to matter. Rather than feeling like an unstoppable monster, you just feel like you’re floating through the world.

Except when jumping. When jumping between platforms, players are forced to doublejump, immediately and always. Though any jump can be a double jump at any point in the jump, if it’s not done instantly it won’t count, and it’s back to the last checkpoint. It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t help anything, it just annoys. Who knew that Dante would be the better jumper than Kratos? Not I, but both have been taking lessons from Simon Belmont. Six feet up, one foot forward. Yay.

Rather than fix the complaints of the QTEs, God of War III misses the point completely and moves the prompts to the side of the screen. It’s almost a good idea. At the top, triangle, bottom, x, you get the idea. The problem is players end up having to stare at the sides of the screen, and it’s particularly bad on a large screen, when it’s in peripheral vision instead of just a bit to the side. The other issue comes with it not always being immediately clear players need to mash the circle button, and the stick twisting prompts are often marred by the game being unresponsive to the input. The QTEs are hard to spot and don’t give a good window of time. Alas, if only they’d taken some cues from the excellent Heavy Rain.

The game’s camera has a tendency to be in the wrong spot as well, a real problem since players have no control over it. It likes to zoom in too close or too far, but always in a way that makes it hard to see Kratos, or hard to see what’s going around. Not that you always want to. Frankly, Kratos is the worst protagonist ever at this point. In the past he’d managed to inspire some sympathy at least, but now he’s just a psychopathic asshole and completely unlikeable. A good revenge story requires something people can get behind, and this doesn’t have it anymore. The story weakened in the second game, and in the third, well, it’s terrible.

In other bad changes, weapons and spells are tied together, though three of the four weapons have very few differences except for being a different spell, and one lets you hold the attack button to use a combo extending finisher, Bayonetta style. Aside from that, three are your standard chains, and there’s one set of big fat punchin’ gloves that really fail to satisfy.

There’s a few annoying escort sequences, though they end mercifully fast. Unmercifully long are the flying sequences, where Kratos heads up or down a ridiculously long tunnel, dodging debris awkwardly. It’s not fun, it’s not exciting, and it’s not really challenging, it’s just annoying and happens far too often. So do instant kill traps and pits. The game loves to kill players without warning in a way that requires ESP not to die. There’s a few puzzle-race sequences like that, where players WILL do them three or four times most likely to succeed, and they’re never short sequences. It’s always a drawn out series of lever pulls where anything short of perfection means starting over. Yet another flaw in a sequel full of them.

God of War III gets two stars. It’s not awful, but it’s more bad than good, and at the point it gets good, it’s over.

Say what you want about the sex included in Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit, at least it wasn’t this bad.

God of War III‘s obligatory sex minigame is a 45 second affair that feels like an hour. While just as before the camera pans away from the action but the sound continues, this time, it gets worse.

This time there are two lovely undressed ladies in the wings, watching and commenting on how great it is.

“By the gods, is he going to?” “If it’s so great watching, imagine how it must feel!” “Oh my, such power!”

And as the scene progresses, they start groping each other more and more, until the end where one pushes the other down and they themselves go at it. It’s as close as it can be to porn without actually being porn, and yet it’s somehow MORE embarrassing to have it seen/heard by other people. At least then there’s an excuse of it being passive. In this, you have to get INVOLVED for those precious experience points. And it’s a known, gamers will do anything for precious experience points, no matter how degrading.

But let’s just try to keep this one from happening again, okay guys?

From their start, it was clear Quantic Dream was a studio swimming upstream from current gaming trends. While FPS and RTS games were taking over, they released Omikron: The Nomad Soul; Omikron was an adventure game featuring David Bowie playing two roles and providing the majority of the soundtrack, not to mention most of the album Hours on the game’s disc. A few years later, technological advancements allowed them to create Indigo Prophecy, a game which could be called a real experiment. The natural evolution of the adventure genre, it had players controlling three characters all acting in opposition to one another, forced to keep an eye on their mental states as they work to solve the mystery presented, occasionally interspersed by action in the form of quick-time events.

Now the studio has released Heavy Rain, a PS3 exclusive title, and the biggest release of February on any platform. Following in the footsteps of Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain is as much movie as game. And not in the Metal Gear 90-minute-sit-and-watch-this-cutscene way, very few things are out of player control, particularly the more cinematic moments. Rather, players direct the action and some of the dialog, working to find clues and solve the mysteries presented through four different main characters’ perspectives. Each is attempting to find  the Origami Killer, a serial killer who drowns children in rainwater, and his latest victim whose number may not be up yet, if they can find him in time.

Like its predecessor, Heavy Rain has players controlling movements in game by mimicking them with the controller, indicated on-screen. Careful movements require slow, subtle movements with the analog stick, forceful movements often involve moving the whole controller. Stomping something, for example, means thrusting the controller down; punching someone means swinging the controller to the side. It’s all indicated in a quick-time event style, with the required movement label hovering over the item. The system helps to add to intuition in the movement, especially analog stick based ones during action sequences in a way reminiscent of Dragon’s Lair and Time Gal. It also draws the eye toward the action, instead of keeping players watching the center of the screen for inputs.

There’s also no failure condition in Heavy Rain. The game continues on, and players live with the consequences, characters show them. No magical medkits in the game, when one of the characters got cut with a saw during a fight, the wound was still on her abdomen during a later scene. The game makes it clear every action and every inaction have consequences, be it a failure to react in time or making a poor decision. Because of the game’s habit of saving after every major decision or action, there’s not going to be a lot of trying it over during the game, though players can restart from any scene after they finish the game. The end result is that players have to carefully weigh decisions, and know it matters. No quickloading if things don’t go right, that’s just how things are going to be. Live with it.

Heavy Rain also takes a big risk by truly wanting to get players emotionally involved. The game starts slow, but with very good reason as things begin to unfold. Rather than just letting players make the easy decision to get the best ending, the game forces players to really feel out a decision. To accept the consequences, to empathize, to think ahead. To ask, as the game’s campaign and manual dare you to, “How far will you go to save someone you love?”

Technically solid, as it really needs to be considering the quick reflexes needed at some points, Heavy Rain holds a high framerate even in some extremely crowded sequences. It also doesn’t sacrifice graphical quality in those scenes, and side from some boundaries seeming to go further than they should around a character (moving through a crowd can look like people are floating away sometimes, rather than the actual contact one gets in Assassin’s Creed), they really are great. Once in a while the texture streaming shows up, but that’s rare. Faces are given particular attention of course, as shown on the loading screens which use a render of the characters’ faces, and at points they manage to show the level of detail and beyond one sees in top budget movies.

It’s a weakness of the game that the acting doesn’t always hold up to the levels it could for what is, effectively, a very long movie. The acting for children in the game is really weak, and their dialog just doesn’t come off as believable sometimes. The four main characters mostly put on solid performances, as do most of the side characters, with occasional weak spots showing up. They’re not winning any Oscars, but they’re not winning a Razzie either generally.

One of the most impressive aspects of the game is the environment presented. Rounded, believable characters moving around an environment that feels like a cheap Hollywood backlot can kill a scene. Heavy Rain spent the time and money on the locations they use to make them real. Quantic Dream always has an impressive musical score, licensing quite a few songs in this case. They’ve also spent the money to use real world gadgets and cars, rather than inventing knockoffs and distracting players with them.

Houses actually feel like real, livable and lived-in places. Train stations are big and open, junkyards have a rusty, downtrodden feel. The whole of the game, taking place during the fall rainstorms, just feels right, and the rain splattering on glass is particularly impressive. There’s an overall feeling of darkness, a quiet sadness in a lot of places, and a chaotic fear in others, aided by weather and music. Heavy Rain manages ambience in a way very few games or movies do.

This is not, to be fair, a game for kids or those looking for action. It calls itself interactive drama with good reason, the bulk of the game is exploring the scene, puzzling things out, talking with other characters. When the action happens, it’s fast and it feels like it’s for keeps, not just a throwaway fight. People come off battered, bruised and exhausted even when they win the fight. Everything has consequences, everything has meaning. Heavy Rain explores real mature themes, with graphic violence at points, nudity, and most of all, emotionally complex themes.

Video games tend to be about anger. It’s easy to tell someone to get revenge. It’s easy to point a gun at some goons who don’t mean anything to anyone, who aren’t people really (or sometimes really aren’t people, they’re zombies or aliens). But Heavy Rain is a game that tells players to save someone. To be in the game, evaluate everyone as a real, living person. Not another mindless target.

But in Heavy Rain, revenge isn’t the goal. The goal is to save a child, and find a serial killer. Heavy Rain is, ultimately, a game about love. That’s something not a lot of games are, but here’s hoping more will be; without a doubt, Heavy Rain an excellent game. If you want action, avoid. If you want an experience, jump on it.