Starcraft 2 101

So far, this blog has been significantly lacking in strategy game posts. Whilst I’d list it as my second favourite genre overall, in general the time investment is prohibitive for me; so I am usually only interested in playing the very very best on offer. And naturally, for real-time strategy (RTS), that means Starcraft – nothing else even comes close to it.  I’ve tried all sorts of other RTS games, but none of them have  ever adequately answered the question “In what way is this any improvement over Starcraft?”. Even the company that made it, Blozzard, have been unable to equal their own achievement – notably flopping completely in my eyes with Warcraft 3, a decent game, but like so many RTS’s before and after it, one which is burnt to a cinder when focused through the withering lens of a comparison against Starcraft. Only the best passes the Captain ZergsEye!

Worse still, Blozzard are also now seeing fit to squander most of their resources on the ridiculously tedious World of Warcrap. This sorry state of affairs makes me almost of a mind to disown my own Uncle (who, as many know, works for Blozzard).

Luckily for any agoners out there, sometimes hope is all we have:

Whilst Blozzard could mess this up, like Warcraft 3, I actually believe they won’t.

And my confidence is entirely thanks to South Korea! Starcraft 1 still has such a huge influence, with immense pro-gaming and e-sport following that Blozzard must use SC2 to build on this even further if it is to be seen as a success. In case you don’t realise it, Starcraft still has two television channels dedicated to progaming matches in S.Korea. Blozzard also seem to have been saying all the right things during the development of the game, with such idiotic ideas as the Mothergoose being a ‘Highlander’ unit hopefully falling by the wayside. They even posted a fascinating battle report recently, which I was really impressed with.

Now my internal hypeometer for this game would be off the charts already, but I’m surpressing it because I don’t really expect to see anything more than perhaps a beta test in 2009 and that’s only if we’re lucky. As many know, Blozzard are happy to delay the release for as long as they feel is necessary. And since Starcraft 2 has the potential to have the kind impact on competitive agoner style gaming that Warcrap has had on carebear chatroom-jockey gaming, they will do well to take their time to get it right.

In the meantime Starcraft 1 still goes on strong. For example this University course has even started over in the States:

Games design luminary David Sirlin is actually attending the course and has been writing up some really interesting commentary over at his own site sirlin.net.

Oddly my own interest in Starcraft is actually, if not unique, certainly a niche interest. Whilst all of the serious play on Starcraft is in competitions of 1 vs 1 or team vs team games, I generally find I prefer other games for that kind of battle – ie: Vs Fighting games. But Starcraft (and hopefully Starcraft 2) really excelled for me for large multi-player ‘free for all’ games of at least 4 players – and the more the better. That’s how I played 99% of my games of Starcraft. However there are a few inherent problems with this – and these are the reasons you’ll never get this kind of game played with ‘pick up groups’ online. To make it fun, fair and competitive it requires all the players to agree to some of ‘house rules’ that the game interface simply had no way of offering.

1. No alliances allowed, ever.

2. No private messaging.

Basically, the problem with Starcraft is that there was no way to stop collusive teamwork in a large free for all game, but this was our best attempt at it. I doubt there will ever be any way to effectively do this online but it would be nice from my point of view if they would at least try. But I suspect it will always be limited to doing this with friends who want this style of game and don’t even want to try to cheat.

What makes this style of Starcraft play amazingly fascinating for me is that it changes the value on almost all aspects of units and strategies in Starcraft. For example; slow but effective wars of attrition often become as important as ‘rush tactics’. Many of the units that are generally derided for 1v1 play, we have found were even used en-masse by players in this style of game. Not a single strategy I’ve ever read online has ever been 100% applicable to a big multiplayer free for all, so it meant that all players would always have to apply things in their own way and come up with new ideas. Psychological tactics, instinctual timing of attacks, ‘mix ups’ and yomi are all vastly heightened over normal Starcraft play – especially since we played as an ongoing series of games with mostly the same players each time. Interestingly this style of play even offers much more of a place for a weaker, slower, non-competitive, or simply new player to partake. Even though they may be very unlikely to win the game overall, everyone would have much more of an opportunity to learn the units and attempt to survive for as long as possible than in a 1v1 game. Even a hopelessly weaker opponent would generally cost a relatively stronger player at least a measure of resources to overcome – so it even became a strategic matter for stronger players in the game. Did they try and overwhelm a weaker opponent at a low relative cost – and deciding when was the best time to do that – or, did they, knowing that player was unlikely to be a threat in the long run, focus their attention on the other ‘big guns’. The other huge reason to play this kind of game is that all the units became viable in almost all games, and it was not at all rare for us to see 200 unit limits reached (and even surpassed by those tricksy cheating Protoss), and utterly immense bloodbath battles taking place – the likes of which even god has never seen… but we did, frequently

So anyway, here’s hoping to a revival of all of that one day, Starcraft 1 or 2… For truth, justice, and the Korean way!

Four Play

I’ve lamented the death of arcade culture over here before, especially for someone outside of London, who must go on some crazy pilgrimage, or to a tournament to even play games in this style. However to my amazement, Capcom decided to run a mini Street Fighter 4 UK tour with some actual arcade cabinets in tow. Despite the fact I’d have my hands on the game itself in only a few weeks  - what made this truly special was that it was going on just a half-hour drive out from my home city. As an SF nut, I just had to show my support for this, no matter what. Sadly on the first day, the whole of the shopping mall in question, Meadowhall, was snowed out; my calls to the shops there going unanswered, the helpdesk did eventually answer me to to explain that the whole place was pretty much closed down and that the SF4 event wouldn’t be going on. I’d later find out that it had been on, but virtually no-0ne had showed up due to the weather & the fact most of the mall was closed. I would have been more upset at missing a chance at this, but I’d had a fantastic evening gaming on HD:R and GoW2 anyway so I couldn’t be too miffed.

The next day however, the snow had died down and melted somewhat, and I had a roving informant already at the mall who eventually tracked down the cabinets and confirmed it was on and would be going on until later that evening.

I was shattered after being at work all week (and too many late nights gaming, naturally), but nothing was going to stop me, as I dug my car out from under the snow and ice with gloves and an ice scraper, and then proceeded to try to drive it off the icesheet that called itself my road. No go, it was literally impassable without some snow tires or something. But instead I managed to slide my car back down the hill on the ice, and managed to get it around the corner and onto the, thankfully clear, main streets of Sheffield. Whew! When I got there I knew exactly where I was headed… yep, I walked straight past the SF4 cabinets with a grin, and wearing my ‘Sonic Boom’ t-shirt like a true SF geek, went on my way to Starbucks. I grabbed a vital double espresso to go, and made my way back to the SF4 stand.

There wasn’t too many people about so I almost immediately got a go, and supping on my espresso, went to select Guile and discovered I had to play as f**king Ryu as the previous person had actually won despite vacating the machine. But I hate Ryu I thought to myself (and perhaps sung out loud)… but proceeded to play anyway. I immediately noticed something was terribly wrong. What was this.. LAG??! On a cabinet? How on earth was this possible? It was actually really horrendous slowdown at times – and as I discussed with the Capcom booth staff on hand later, apparently these weren’t “full spec” cabs, and didn’t have the correct graphics cards or RAM or something. Of course their reassurances to me that the console version would be fine weren’t really necessary as I knew this was some really freaky problem, having played at least a little on SF4 cabs that were perfectly fine before; but talk about a terrible way to promote your game.

Still, it was free, and so my quarter-circle-punch’ing went on unbowed by this unfortunate turn of events. I discovered I couldn’t seem to get out a Super or Ultra move though, despite the fact I find Ryu’s double fireball motion easy most of the time. My opponents weren’t exactly taking advantage of the flaws in my game though, and three easy wins later my opponent was motioning wildly at my win counter for some reason. Bemused, I then discovered this had earned me an SF4 t-shirt for my troubles, and I also realised as his arm waving got more exasperated that he was in fact using sign language. Sadly I don’t know any sign language, but I still managed to communicate through the universal language of Street Fighter, smiles and points at the screen with both him and his friends during the course of the evening. There was only one competitor all night though who could give me anything like a good game (wushudude, who’d travelled from Manchester), but I was still having fun, and we were more interested in experimenting with focus attacks, dash cancels, different characters and the like. I even discovered that due to the slowdown on the machines that Ultras and other complex motions could be performed, you just had to input the motions incredibly slowly for the game to register it.

A day away later, I woke up after hardly any sleep after playing Drunken SF HD Remix all ‘night’ until 8am, and in a very short space of time somehow managed to get myself back to Meadowhall, for more coffee & SF4, this time with a couple of friends with me, including fellow blogger Navan Daughn. SF4 does seem to be associated with a lack of sleep for me now. This was quite a different experience to the other night, as the weather had cleared further, and the mall, and the machines were packed. The bad news was it took some time to get a go and you probably wouldn’t stay on the machines for the maximum 3 wins unless you got a run of weaker opponents. However it was great to chat with a lot more knowledgeable players and bigger fans, and to get some good competition – not to mention the tantalising “oooh” of the crowd when spectacular moves and near misses occured. Of course that competition was really dulled by the amount of experimentation with the new game systems going on, and not to mention our total exasberation with the slowdown, causing some stages of fights to become utterly random. 3rd Strike player SrWilson has put up some videos on youtube of the SF4 games at Meadowhall.

Yes that's really agoners own Navan Daughn on the nearest cab putting in his first real-life appearance on this blog!

So yes, all in all it wasn’t an incredible experience thanks to the dodgy cabs, but there were some real highlights for me. The chance, if only for a few brief hours, to play games in this kind of arcade environment was really fantastic for me. In fact it was arguably better than ever before for me, as now I’m a converted stick player, I don’t feel like I am playing with one arm tied behind my back just because I have to use a joystick. In fact the Viewlix cabs had absolutely gorgeous controls – and it was great to really start to get to hands-on with them, knowing that my Tournament Edition Madcatz SF4 joystick is only a few weeks away, and it itself is modelled off these same cabs; even using almost the same parts. But it was the comaraderie and audience of the crowd that makes this kind of gaming just so special. Not to mention the game itself. I’ve been pretty harsh on SF4 in general, as it’s taken a number of design turns that I really disagree with, completely counter to say, the great decisions made in HD Remix. However I have to say with actually a few hours of play under my belt now, the game is warming on me. The amount of mind games and techniques based around the focus attack is really impressive, and the mixture of some of the best elements of Street Fighter 3 is really a great idea. Not to mention giving anyone with a good grounding in SF3 a huge initial advantage at SF4 I would suggest. I’ll never agree with choice to maintain (and even worsen) the overly complex commands, and I’ll lament the atrocious character roster until hopefully one day something like SF5 makes amends for it. But until then, it was good to see some more good in SF4 than I expected – and I’m really looking forward to the home version much much more now, thanks to this UK Tour.

Yes, there really is a guy who's cut his hair like Zangief! What a dude!

Ultimate Achievement Unlocked: MACROSS Gamerscore

I WIN!!!11! olol

Far more fun than racking up a huge pointless gamerscore…

This historic moment deserves to be captured for posterity:

It doesn’t get much better than this in Gamerscore land.

MA
KU
RO
SU

Special thanks go to an unlikely set of games that made this possible: Sonic the Hedgehog (original XBLA), Doritos Dash of Destruction – both of which I got free, and Senko No Ronde (Wartech) which I’m actually rather enjoying at my utter newbie level of play on it.

The only trouble is, I  really don’t want to get any more Achievements ever now, which is why I wanted to get this done before Street Fighter 4, as that will hopefully make me forget about this enough to ignore ruining my score. And once I do.. see you again in 70,000 points time. (I hope my score carries onto the XBox 720 then )

Another Team Shitty X Classic

In case you hadn’t already realised, myself and Navan’s piss-take neophyte gaming ‘clan’ Team Shitty Shotty has branched out into so many fields now that it’s become known as Team Shitty X, or just TSX. We now have a theme song, the Scatman, and has a variety of specialised gaming divisions:

Team Shitty Shotty – for the common arena of games such as Gears of War and Halolz, where Team Shitty X made its first impact.

Team Shitty Clicky – for strategy games of clicking on things. Currently TSX can sometimes be found attempting to make all your base belong to them in Age of Bootay.

Team Shitty Hitty – for my own personal favourite, fighting games. Hulk’s power is to jump!

 

Now whilst fighting games aren’t generally known for teamwork, Team Shitty Hitty already has it’s Team Shitty Hitty Dojo in place for members, where Remy-sensei attempts to teach willing students the basics to intermediate skills of Street Fighting in HD Remix. But for the less serious gamers TSX has yet more to offer. MightyOtaKing; The Official Commentator of Remy77077 has been brought onboard on a few occasions now as well… For Double Team Street Fighter HD Remix.

Let the challenge bellow out over XBox Live! states the Otaking, also advertising this over on his DeviantArt blog.

But how does such a mighty event take place? Here I’ll lend you privy to the innermost secret machinations of TSX. It involves large, some might say immense quantities of alcohol, the Corporation night club in Sheffield, extremely late nights, pizza and/or chips, myself taking the controls of the joystick attempting to prove my Art of Drunken Street Fighting to the world, whilst MightyOtaKing (foolishly not having  an XBL Gold account of his own) delivers biting & insightful commentary on all the proceedings via my very own microphone. This effective double team generally proves to be an unstoppable assault on most if not all of your senses. 

• What are they feeding the horse?
• Just HOW many Elephants?
• What’s the significance of the chicken and the size of the sombreros?
• The impact of detergent and pink outfits on the outcome of battle.
• Just how ‘cheap’ will Remy77077’s tactics become? 
• Will anyone leave me alone whilst I play one handed eating my chips?

If you are lucky enough to join us for a Drunken SF with Drunken Commentary session, you could find out the answers to all of these, and a lot more. The truely brave and high-stamina opponents may even get the rare chance to fight against MightyOtaKing himself. Like Oro, he’s been in hiding waiting for a worthy opponent – but when you hear one of his battle cries: “the gloves are off!” or “have some of that!”, you’ll know you’ve been hit by, you’ve been struck by, a smooth Otaking.

When? Generally on Saturday nights, sometime after 3am UK-time, that’s 4am mainland Europe, and 10pm EST for you yankees out there.
Where? XBox Live, Street Fighter HD Remix, and forthcoming Street Fighter 4 should the game prove worthy. Look for Remy77077 hosting a player match room.

Places are extremely limited, so act now friends & blog readers!

Got any Gears man?

The fact I have described anything even remotely close to an FPS as ‘brilliant’ and even voted it as my ‘game of the year’ for 2008, at least when forced into a small selection picklist on a few websites, is really remarkable. Obviously given a free choice of game of the year, there would be quite a few titles I’d pick over this, a large number of those talked about on this blog for example. But yes, Gears of War 2 is, a brilliant game. There, I said it.

It really picks up everything that Gears 1 did so well, and builds on it further. Sadly though, it still really lacks in a few important areas.

The main one you notice at first is the storyline. And I’d better warn you here that there will be a few SPOILERS in this post. Whilst it started to get me really intrigued for a while, I began to expect long before the end of the game that I was in for nothing more than a huge letdown.. and in that regard it didn’t dissapoint. The attempt at a more serious and detailed plot than Gears 1 really falls extremely flat. It seems to have been written in an incredibly lazy fashion, not really making any sense when analysed and simply setting up numerous ‘hooks’ that they can oh-so-cleverly link to in any fashion in later games, when really its abundantly clear they are making it up as they go along.

It lurches along so randomly and nonsensically that you get the distinct impression that it’s all just a vague excuse to move you onto the next marvellous section of gameplay, which of course, it is. And I have to say, as an agoner, I’m completely fine with that. But don’t expect the plot to offer any more than a thin veneer of relevance to spread on your gameplay slice when you play Gears 2. I think the self-made comparison to a “blockbuster action movie” for the game is a fairly accurate one. The plot’s about as atrocious as your average stock action film, although the fact it is supposed to be a linked series of games does heighten the disappointment in some ways. As ups55 said to me “I really hope they stop at a third game”. The trouble is, the actual explanation of their story seems to be crawling at such a pace that it felt at the end of the game, you feel like you’ll be waiting for Gears of War 5 before you get any answers at all. This leaves you feeling very empty.  As J. Michael Straczynski has said, you can only dangle the “mystery carrot” in a plotline for so long before an audience becomes weary of it, yet Gears of War seems determined to stretch the ‘revelation payoff’ far, far into the future (in a galaxy far far away?). Most likely because they haven’t even decided what the ‘revelation’ will even be yet. For example, maybe Kerrigan.. sorry, I mean the Locust Queen, is getting it on with Adam Fenix in an attempt to breed the perfect hybrid Xel’Naga? Who knows… and after Gears 2, I’d be tempted to ask ‘who cares?’ anyway. Recent comments show I am probably correct though and they are determined to ‘leave us dangling’ for a long time, as Epic intend Gears to go on for another 10 years, well, maybe.

To be positive though, the best part for me, was not the much hyped Dom & Maria sections, but actually, Tai’s death. This was the one part of the game that actually shocked and even moved me slightly. The whole Maria segment was foreshadowed so much that it was practically ruined. And why weren’t Marcus and Dom even interested in trying to rescue anyone else? I remember myself and Navan laughing about this at the time, commentating the game with “oh well, sod you then!” as we ignored yet another bunch of Zerg.. sorry, I mean Locust, hostages, in the search for the all-important Ave-Maria. Also, whilst it worked on some level as a tragedy, it wasn’t anywhere near as moving as anything in Lost Odyssey which showed me just how good game writing can get. Picking on this section isn’t even really fair though, if you analyse any segment of the game’s plot it really breaks down quickly. For example I’ve recently been playing through again, on Insane difficulty, the Black Mesa Facility section, sorry, I mean the New Hope Facility section. What does this entire section add to the story? – actually very little. There’s another ‘oooh look there’s some kind of conspiracy going on here’ point delivered in a particularly obvious slap-like manner to the players face, just in case there was anyone dumb enough not to have noticed already, and it also gets them en-route to Mount Doom, sorry I mean, Mount Kadar. But what it really adds to the game are some nice tense gameplay moments with the calmness of the facility and the later Sire attacks. Although it has to be said the Sires are so laughably easy for two competent chainsaw wielders this is one place where the disconnect between the gameplay and the mood ruins the attempted atmosphere – a common problem I have with many games that are supposedly ‘atmospheric’ incidentally. In fact if anything could make me sick of the wonderful chainsaw effects in Gears of War, it would be this segment.

Picking plot holes in the game is so laughably ‘Too Easy’ as Geese Howard would say, but I do want to mention perhaps the worst one of all – the sudden ‘turning’ of the Lambent Flood, turning the fight into a three way battle. Sorry, I meant the Lambent Locusts of course. But go back and play Gears of War 1, and notice those Lambent wretches clearly fighting alongside General RAAM & the flying Locusts in the last few levels… Hmmm, they really seem to be in some bitter civil war there don’t they. Or perhaps they just thought of adding this ‘amazing twist’ in at a later point? Naaah.. couldn’t be.

But when you get down to it, the important part is how good and varied the gameplay is throughout the campaign. I’ve played through most levels of it  3 or 4 times now and it still hasn’t gotten boring and I’m still keen to play more. That really is excellent for a game of this ilk, as I virtually never play even twice through any kind of on-rails level to level game like this. Perhaps it’s just the lure of those Achievements, but I really don’t think so – I just can ‘t deny the sheer unadulterated fun of it all.

What’s also nice is that whilst it has clear difficulty spikes, they generally feel reasonably fair, and are spread out throughout the game, rather than being a pure ‘ramp up’. In fact its noticeable that the game really doesn’t get harder from Act to Act, which is actually best in my opinion if you want to encourage repeated play. I’ve heard some moaning about the difficulty in Gears 2, in particular the amount of ‘instant deaths’ that can occur, and some whines about the checkpointing. Now I can really understand these issues, as my own frustration barrier is generally reasonably low in a game like this, and certain sections on Gears 2 have really pushed it to the extreme, it’s always been pitched at close to the right level for me. Hard enough to frustrate, but also always doable so that I feel like progress is being made. Although I have noticed on a number of sections my emotion upon completing them has switched to actual relief rather than one of fiero. A sign that shows they are right on the borderline for me, almost inducing a fear of failure – but this is on “Insane” difficulty. But what also makes it work so well for me is the addition of a co-op partner to get me through these kind of frustrating segments in the gameplay. A problem shared is a problem halved really seems to work for me. I feel I would have gotten overly frustrated and bored a number of times in Gears 2 if I hadn’t been playing it with a co-op partner, even where the addition of that partner is actually making the section harder to complete.

In fact it’s the excellent integration of co-op that really makes Gears shine for me. Playing through the same level as a different character adds a huge amount to the gameplay as well. For example, having played as the ‘gunner’ in the co-op driving sections, it gave me an amazing perspective on what not to do, when I was assigned the drivers role. Also the co-operation sometimes needed to heal a ‘bleeding out’ downed teammate is really fun in the heat of battle.

It’s also good to note that the game was entirely bug free…

And I certainly didn’t notice any hilarious problems myself…

Why are those guns floating in the air mommy?

I wish Navan Daughn wouldn't insist on wearing his Ikea furniture skirt during battles

For The Swarm

The Horde mode is also a brilliantly fun addition to Gears 2. Whilst I feel its one that’s relatively short lived and I don’t think I’ll go back to it once I’ve achieved certain goals on it I want to do with the right group of friends, I am incredibly glad it’s there as it offers so much for co-op online play with more than 2 people. The level of co-operation needed is it’s double-edged sword though. I find playing with a random pick-up group utterly impossible and boring in the extreme, as people refuse to work together, leave enemies alive to collect ammo, “score rush” and other stupid and pointless antics.

Multiplayer Versus seems to be another matter entirely. I cannot seem to get into this at all. The staggering improvements made to the gameplay simply by putting the game in a third-person perspective rather than the irrovacably flawed first-person view actually seem to collapse in upon themselves when playing at the blistering pace of versus battles. The weapons, health system, dashing and rolling, taking cover.. nothing seems to be balanced well for multiplayer. In fact I think Gears 2 online multiplayer is a great example of Rob Pardo of Blozzard’s point that games need to be designed from the ground up as multiplayer ‘versus’ games if they are really to work for this kind of competition. That said, I am aware Epic are still working on yet more patches to get this part of the game up to par, so hopefully they can be successful with this too. It certainly has a lot of potential.

Now at this point I’m noticing I haven’t really worked in a reference to anything really obscure, like some German industrial band or something, as is common for my blog posts. But the really cool thing about Gears of War 2, is that it’s already done it for me, with the incredible Chairman Painbastard :O