Game Curmudgeons

The galaxy is a big, big place. And when you can explore this much of it, things take a while.

The general policy here is to get to the end of any game with a linear objective, and to get a significant dose of sandboxes and sports games.

Well, there is an end goal to Mass Effect, and there’s a lot of sidequest. I’m at 22 hours, and I believe I’m halfway done at most. It’s not too early to recommend the game, however, and this is the point where I do so.

In summary, the game is awesome. I’m going to go over my weak points, in a nice bulleted list, so you know what to watch for, because the rest is just great. Moar! »

Because Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones just aren’t enough(there is not any sarcasm in that statement, by the way, as those are fucking awesome), here’s a teaser for LEGO BATMAN.

I can’t wait to toss lego bad guys through lego plate glass windows, myself.

I recently read this article on Next Gen and it got me thinking. After I stopped thinking how silly some of those rules were (don’t even get me started on peoples’ complaints about cut scenes), I started to think about what makes a good game. Yeah, I know, broad subject, but I think we can make this generic enough to pull important points from gaming in general, not from specific genres or titles. Fair warning, this is from a game player and armchair designer perspective, so while I believe in it whole heartedly, you have to take what works for you from it.

Let’s start with what the original article covers(for the most part).

Usability. What does that mean in terms of video games? For me, it means I don’t have to think of the interface. I don’t have to try to figure out what the designers of the game were thinking when they created it. I don’t have to remember what the red bar, blue bar, and green bar mean depending because it’s obvious. I don’t have to learn their lingo or that they like shift-right-click to select things. As a matter a fact, there should be multiple ways to do the same thing, because not everyone is going to attempt to do things the same. Blizzard does this really well. I can think of three different ways to cast healing spells in WoW off the top of my head, and I’m sure there are more. That’s what I mean. Make the interface intuitive, allow the user to do things the way they want, not just the way you want. It’s of huge importance and most companies (both in consoles and on PC) don’t get it.

Moar! »

Valve is set to release The Orange Box in 8 hours.

Now, we’ve only played Team Fortress 2 so far, like everyone else in the beta. And that alone to me makes it worth it. We’ll have a full review up in a few days after the official release, but the beta has been an absolute blast, and gets better every day. Valve’s rapid patching, improvement of balance, and elimination of any exploits has been amazing.

Honestly, I’ve enjoyed TF2 more than any other multiplayer focused game. More than the BF games, more than Quake Wars, and yes, more than Counter-Strike or Halo 3.

While the full review is going to include HL2:Ep 2 and Portal(which are pretty sure bets), I feel I can safely say that TF2 alone is worth the price of admission. If you’re not so sure, there’s always the standalone for 30 dollars, which is absolutely worth it.

The game has been in beta for two weeks and already it’s hard to find friends or groups (an addition of the Steam Community added with it. Love the Steam Community features. See below for more detail) playing it. Why? Because the whole game is very small. There are six different maps, though Valve promises more later, three different game types and nine different classes. The whole game will take about 10-20 hours to burn out on for most people.

But, you say, that’s not bad. And if this were a single player game, I’d agree. But a multiplayer game that you get tired of in 10+ hours? That doesn’t sit right with me. If you’re into multiplayer games like Counter-Strike, the Battlefield series(BF2 being the best of them), etc, you’re probably used to a game like that grabbing you for hours and hours and being played on and off for months, maybe longer (I still fire up BF2 from time to time). The official word from Valve is that they will be releasing more maps, but they didn’t want to include too many in the initial release (the six maps are the same six maps, plus any beta testing changes) for the sake of a having a large quantity. So they went with quality over quantity. I can respect that. Except, these maps are small. Really small. Think as small as many of the original Counter-Strike maps. So you’re going to know these maps like the back of your hand in a week of play.

Yeah, I know, this seems to be a really lousy complaint against what is by all the talk in the great big internet is a really good game. Hell, I was going to originally name this piece the Team Fortress 2: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (you know, since that idea has never been used before). But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Yeah, the game has some really good stuff. The art direction and the sound are above and beyond top notch. The personalities they have for the characters are pretty cool (though a friend brought up that there isn’t much diversity in the races or sexes of the people…a very fair point). And the balance feels pretty spot on, especially for a beta.

The flaws of this game bring it way down though. Because after a bit of play, the voices, the art direction and so on don’t really matter. The personality of the characters even less. What matters is variety of play, variety of levels, interesting gameplay to drive the game beyond being a flash in the pan. With that in mind, Team Fortress 2 falls down.

As a matter of fact, thinking about it, maybe this game wasn’t really designed for me, the squad based game playing type. The graphics have a very fierce requirement level (though so did Battlefield 2 when it was first released), the big points (art direction, graphics, etc) of the game aren’t particularly appealing to the Counter-Strike player beyond a few plays and a big part of their PR push was the characters personalities, something I said at the time was really cool, but wasn’t going to convince me to play the game. Maybe I’m not the target market like I thought I was. Maybe I should just stick to other squad based combat games and play this game from time to time when I get bored of Episode 2.

On a side note though, the Steam Community stuff that came out with TF2 is sweet personified. I know every time a buddy is playing the game and I can join them directly through the Steam interface. When the game first came out and everyone was playing, I never joined a server directly, just through Community page joining up with one of my friends. That’s great. And so is the Shift+Tab overlay in the game to allow to see the your friends, what they are doing and communicate with them, be they in game or not. Those are great features that should be in every game. I’m going to miss them when playing other games most definitely.

The problem being I don’t think any of that is going to get people to keep playing this very small game that took nine years to develop. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but I find myself getting bored already. I’ve played all of the levels, have the choke points pretty much defined and what classes are best used where. It’s nice and comfortable already…and kinda boring too.

Today, we launch.

Take a look around at our bios, mail us if you have anything to say about our relatively blank page.

Currently, we’re working on several reviews. Bioshock, Dynasty Warriors:Gundam, and NHL 08 are in the pipe, along with some impressions of the Team Fortress 2 beta(already worth the 45 dollar pre-order, beta form or not).

If all goes well, we’re going to have an interview with Brad Wardell for your perusal soon.

Until then, enjoy our lack of obnoxious Web 2.0 design. No videos, no music, no myspace kids!