Control Freak

“Been playing HL2 as I fancy going through it again. I’m enjoying it, but still find it weird on the XBOX controller. Things which are piss easy on the mouse can be a real bugger on the controller” – Navan Daughn

Valve need to get their heads screwed on for console conversions

When does a controller become part of the game? Pretty much always! However the degree to which it affects the game experience really varies wildly from case to case. I think Navan now understands some of my complaints with regards to The Orange Box much better, having tried it on a twin stick pad. And having played through Half Life 1 myself on a mouse, I already wish I’d got The Orange Box on the PC rather than for the 360. I’m having the same problem with Left 4 Dead as well. Apart from the small concession of a quick-turn button the game is completely designed for mouse & keyboard control rather than for twin stick on a gamepad, and I felt the game really suffered. Now with the Left 4 Dead 2 demo out, I’ve been able to directly compare it on the 360 vs the PC; and there was no contest at all, the game handled far more easily on a mouse, and due to the design of the game this made it actually much more fun to play in many ways. It leaves me frustrated with both versions because many more of my friends are on 360, and I’d much rather play over XBox Live, in the comfort of my front room, with my preferred twin sticks; yet the game feels so much nicer to control on the PC with a mouse and keyboard. So basically I won’t be 100% satisfied with either version. I realised what I really want is a proper “Left 4 Dead 360″ version that changes the game control mechanics enough so that control on a twin stick pad becomes viable & fun and doesn’t feel like you’re stuggling to replicate a mouse. Halo, Gears and many other titles all do this fine, so it can be done.

Some people may say it’s a simple case of “always play a game on it’s default intended controller”, which held more weight with arcade conversions, but it’s still not exactly clear cut. Should Street Fighter 2 HD Remix be played on an 360 or PS3 pad since those are the systems it was released for? Ok, it’s clearly a update of an original joystick game though – so fine, use a joystick. But what about the differences between different joysticks? Isn’t it a bit of an unfair advantage in the game to be using a high quality controller vs someone that isn’t? For Street Fighter IV, shouldn’t I always be using button bindings and turbo auto fire? These things are built into the game options and the official controller! On the PC it gets even more murky, with WoW Macro keyboards, gaming mice with extra button bindings and on and on. Where do you draw the line between cheating and ‘playing to win’ when it comes to your choice of controller? Should you even be allowed to reconfigure your button layout on Halo on the 360? That sounds ridiculous I know, but it shows how difficult it is to draw the line without some kind of organisation of the metagame rules around the video game itself. For Street Fighter, I play to the standard I’ll be held to at whatever offline tournament I want to enter, but if I wasn’t competing in organised offline events, what then?

Auto-fire is probably the biggest controller issue on competitive 360 games, and it affects everything from Street Fighter to FPS titles. There are some quite simple solutions to either designing the game so it won’t be an issue, or detecting it as cheating online. But sadly games developers don’t appear to care, putting in pistols that ‘fire as fast as you can press the button’ which is foolishly naive in an online competitive game, and making the aforementioned official controllers with auto-fire built in. It’s there so you can test combos out in training mode? Yeh right. And the line just gets blurrier all the time – it is already possible to use a keyboard and mouse on a 360 if you are willing to go to enough trouble with things like this XPFS 4.0 Speed.

Another game I love, Virtual On was recently re-released in an upgraded version on the 360 on XBLA, and I was initally overjoyed. But it requires such a specialised controller to play properly I’ve completely avoided it until one comes available. My friend Ollie Barder covered the history of Virtua Ron (as I affectionately refer to it sometimes) and it’s controller issues on the 360 here. However, luckily, fan pressure has meant that a twin-stick controller for the 360 was eventually announced. It’s still not out at the time of writing, but is imminent, and can be previewed at Hori’s site. Of course the problem is whether I’ll ever be able to get hold of one in the UK, and at what price, and then will the game’s netcode make it worthwhile to even play, let alone shell out for another controller.

I don’t really have any answers here, with the current state of play, other than to raise this point as yet another murky area of gaming that developers of competitive games, and conversions of games, really ought to pay much more attention to. However especially on platforms like the PC, it might be a case that there’s very little they can do to control the issue however. All this, and I haven’t even touched on WiiMotes or Natal yet!

Saving Anywhere costs you Half a Life

It’s taken me almost a year, but I’ve finally completed Half Life on the PC. The reason it took me so long to play was that I only played it in my ’spare moments’, usually late at night, far apart from my more dedicated gaming time. That wasn’t something intentional, it was because the game wholly failed to grab me at all. It was really only the non-game factors that ever piqued my interest – mainly a desire to discover the story, and to see what all the fuss was about with this old game (1998). Now this review does a good job of placing the game in its historical context, but my problem is despite all the innovations to the FPS genre, that doesn’t mean this was a fun game to actually play through then, and it certainly isn’t now.

What absolutely kills this game is the save game mechanic. You can save at absolutely any point, anywhere, with an infinite amount of save slots, and you can even ‘quick save’ and ‘quick load’ almost instantaneously. Such a mechanic will kill any action orientated game, as all elements of suspense and worse, challenge, are ruined. Half Life basically devolves into a trial-and-error slog throughout. Any battle, no matter how ‘hard’, can easily be overcome not by any improvement in the player’s skill (although it will require a basic minimum), but by simply increasing the use of saving & restarts. The issue of checkpoints or setting the right challenge and difficultly level for the player has been sidestepped – it’s effectively set on an infinitely potentially easy challenge at all times, as determined by the player. But the player has very little idea of how hard or easy they are making it a lot of the time. How on earth is the player even supposed to guess what a “Normal” difficulty should be for this game?

Could anything be further from the ideal of an arcade challenge and hard-fun? In fact I recall when I started to play Half Life 2 in The Orange Box, I was shocked to discover such a mechanic, as I’d played through a good chunk of the game assuming only the in-game checkpoints that I was used to. But given ’save anywhere, anytime’ any action game becomes an interactive movie more than a game; albeit one with potential frustration & repetition to progress through. Now perhaps there is some hidden ‘ideal’ in the game to only rely on the game’s built-in auto saves, and to attempt to never use the save states (in much the same way “one credit” play is often assumed in an arcade title for the real challenge level). But if this is so, why did the designers not build this into the actual game mechanics? At the very least score a player on the least use of save states or something of that ilk. But the trouble is that many parts of the game seem so obtuse in their design that without the assumed use of heavy repetition, the player really has little chance of passing them, and the game is so long, it is hardly reasonable to require the player to re-start the whole game like a true arcade title. For an example of this type of design, I did enjoy the high level of variety of the weapons in the game – in terms of feel and effectiveness in different conditions & vs different enemies, but the trouble was the game would give me little or no idea as to what the effectiveness conditions of the various weapons actually was. Couple this with random and unknown restocks of future ammunition for said weapons, and the player is clearly being guided by this design to use (& abuse) the trial and error method of play on offer by the save game mechanics.

Now of course the game offers more than shooting based challenges – there are also heavy platforming & manoeuvre sections. Platforming in a first person perspective is one of the most irritating and silly game mechanics I’ve ever come across. I have never been a huge fan of platform games anyway, but I’m aware of a few that managed to effectively translate this play mechanic in 3D environments (such as Mario 64, or even Gun Valkyrie), and they all did it by using a third-person perspective.

Lastly we come to the puzzle element in Half Life. Which mostly comes down to “where the **** do I go now?” or it’s close cousin “how do I get through this bit without X killing/damaging me?”. Now these are the only areas of the game where I actually became stuck a few times and found any real challenge in completing. However most of the time I was simply lost because I hadn’t played the game in a long time (usually due to being bored by it), and the game often gave very little indication of even the direction of progress (although some levels are indeed expertly arranged). However the solution to all of the times I got stuck was either trial and error on movement timing or a jump, or more often had a totally illogical solution which almost always involved moving your ‘disembodied hand & weapon floating camera’ along a 1 pixel wide ledge or pipe. These manoeuvres would be totally impossible in any game where you actually played a character that had any sense of scale and size, or even vaguely realistic physics to the placement of your character within the game environment. The trouble is that, given the save mechanic, these puzzle elements were pretty much the only challenging part of the game left to actually play. It did make me think that if you must design a game within the limiting restraints of a save mechanic like this, making something like Portal -where the action elements have been mostly stripped out in return for far more puzzle elements – is actually the logical way to go to improve it.

The story to Half Life was, by game standards, rather good – albeit very short and simple. And it is told in a fantastic method without recourse to dull non-interactive cut scenes, so I did enjoy that aspect of it. For me the two best things that came out of this experience was that I was introduced to Steam & I actually slowly found my FPS playing skills with keyboard and mouse control vastly improving as I went along. By the time I got through some of the latter action & platform heavy sections I was starting to actually enjoy playing with a mouse & keyboard, as for the first time I didn’t feel like I was battling the control scheme.

Half Life has of course won many awards, but none as coveted or as well deserved as the Agoner’s single turd.

Versus Flow

“In theory I love playing online with people on Versus but I get frustrated because I suck so badly at it, with my reaction time, that I just die constantly, and after a while of no joy whatsoever, it loses it’s fun factor.” -DeeGruenEinzige

The game designer’s job of setting the right difficulty and challenge level when it comes to the technical execution required to play a game (as previously discussed here) and the overall “solo” experience in a game is one thing, but for multiplayer competitive ‘versus’ style games it’s a different beast entirely. Here, to a reasonable extent I believe, you can measure the challenge, and hence the ability for a player to experience an enjoyable state of ‘flow’ depending on the person (or team) that they are competing against, and measuring their ‘chance to win’, based on their skill level versus the skill level of the competition. When there is a huge disparity in skill level, and one team or player is easily beating the other, then clearly there is little chance for either team or player to experience flow. Conversely where both players are of a similar skill level, and both would ‘on paper’ have a 50% chance to win, and are winning around that rate upon repeated competitive play, then you’ve got the potential for a really fun game where all players are in the ‘flow zone’.

Now of course, the game’s mechanics still play a part in the flow experience, and you can only go so far with this. A gamer’s taste in games will also come into play. It’s unlikely that even two equally skilled players winning 50% of the time are going to get to a heightened state of flow from repeated games of noughts and crosses (that’s tic-tac-toe for our American readers!), paper-rock-scissors (jun-ken-pon), or even a perfect 50/50 game of ‘flip the coin’ (unless they love alea and really enjoy winning by luck). And conversely many players wouldn’t enjoy a drawn out game of chess, even if it was against someone of exactly the same skill. The vast majority of gamers don’t appear to enjoy competitive play whatsoever. But we can assume for the sake of this article that we’ve got a game that both the players or teams of players enjoy playing, or potentially would enjoy playing.

The Only Test is Your Skill: Face Him Straight!

Now getting the game difficulty and game mechanics right for ‘flow’ in a single-player experience is a really difficult task. So much has been written on that topic already elsewhere. The big problem is matching the challenges in the game to every individual player’s skills, which of course, vary widely. And their tastes in the level of challenge and type of challenge they want (if any at all!) also varies. So you get solutions such as different difficulty settings, the ability to save your game, or as I’ve already discussed as an example setting the difficulty of moves within a game. However getting the potential for ‘versus flow’ right ie: the difficulty setting of versus mode, is actually a very simple goal, no matter the type of game: You simply need to match up two players (or teams of players) of relatively equal skill. Yet this is exactly where video games fall down.

I’ve referenced this issue a multitude of times here on Agoners, and I’m continually astounded that not even a single game has ever really tried to address this fully. I see this as the vital missing component in so many games.

Imagine if you could play a game of Street Fighter (any version!) and have a good chance of fighting against someone very close to your skill level with the character you selected to play. I cannot fathom that anyone would not find that more fun than the current situation; where it’s effectively totally random who you get to play, outside of creating your own game invites. On Street Fighter 2 HDR Ranked Match or a random Player Match lobby, you’re as likely to fight against Joe Noob, who can barely block an attack, as you are to fight against an Evo champion like Afro Legends - and I have first hand experience of both. Now of course your subsequent rating change, win or lose, will attempt to reflect the level of your competition – and HDR has one of the very few decent skill rating systems out there (provided all players have played enough games, you always play your best character(s) in ranked, and don’t get idiots playing you with rubbish ping times, or Akuma players…). But I feel the aim of an online matchmaking system ought to be to provide fun for the players first, and a realistic ranking or rating system second. But of course the rating system itself does become critical if you use it to matchmake. Street Fighter IV is also a total failure in this regard. Whilst it’s “Championship Mode” patch at least gave players the chance to get a match against a similarly skilled opponent with it’s grade point system, the system of grading players itself was so flawed, with far too wide levelling and grinding potential, that this actually did nothing but add a a slightly improved, but still only very small chance of a good versus match. Probably the only fighting game that even comes close to decent matchmaking is Virtua Fighter 5 – but only if people use the ‘find players close to my level’ option; which many do not, given that not enough players with good ping-times are play the game.

I can't believe I only stumbled across halolz.com thanks to writing this article - great site, click image for more!

When it comes to another staple competitive genre – FPS’s – things are arguably even worse. Almost every game I’ve played that could be a helluva lot of fun with good matchmaking eg. Left 4 Dead Versus Mode or Team Fortress 2, has no actual attempt at matchmaking at all. And adding vastly to the complexity is the fact that determining the skill of teams is a far more difficult task than ascertaining a single player’s ability. But what amazes me is that these games don’t even try.

I’ve often held up Halo 3 as one of the exemplars of good matching, with it’s in-depth experience point and grading system and seemingly excellent matchmaking system. However I’ve played a lot more of it since Halo 3 ODST came out, and very quickly huge cracks started to appear to me. There’s a lot of them, but they all generally fall under the umbrella of the major problem being that players are not realistically ranked on the actual skills that matter in the game. For example, map knowledge plays a huge part, whether in a team game or a free-for-all. However the matchmaking works on the assumption that you are equally knowledgeable on all maps in the game… not so much fun when you’ve never had a DLC map-pack, and just got ODST and hence are experiencing a multitude of new maps for the first time.

Jumpers for goalposts

I could go into a lot more depth about the problems in virtually all current games across any genre, this is just a sample that I am familiar with. But the point is that hopefully it’s obvious that it is a problem. If you analogise video games to real sports, the current situation is like asking a soccer team to have to play against anyone from the Premiership, through to a bottom division, to a bunch of kids kicking the ball around in the park, whenever they want to play a match. Most versus modes on games don’t even attempt to offer anything like Easy mode or Hard mode, or even a Normal; it’s just totally random, or more likely VERY HARD all the time, if you’re not an expert experienced player. How many of those players out there who don’t appear to enjoy playing competitive games, like the quote at the start of this article, might do, if they felt they had a chance for a ‘equal match’. Next time in this series I’ll look at some possibilities for solving it, and better ways of doing things.

PC vs Console

My move and settlement to Athens, Greece has finally been completed and I have some spare time to assault your eyeballs with another post regarding the PC vs Console debate.

I was inspired back into the debate by the release of the news that Left 4 Dead will be getting new DLC and the PC will be getting it for free but XBOX owners will pay (XBOX:0, PC: 1). Is this fair? Is there a reason?

Well it’s a big fat no, not as far as anyone can ascertain.

My guess is that Valve, in their glory and wisdom, realise that XBOX owners are a bunch of chumps who will pay for cat flavored peanut butter if there’s an achievement to be gotten, whereas PC owners are a bunch of thieving villanous bastards who’ll just download it from a torrent for free if money is mentioned. Taking this into account, I think it’s more of a cultural issue than anything technical or competitive.

He Owns a PC

What I have come to realise regarding PCs and Consoles is that you really need both. I own Call of Duty 4:MW on the PC and the XBOX360. But the one I play exclusively is the XBOX one. There is only one reason why, and that is because my friends play it there. I don’t play these games for the single player experience, if I did I’d still be playing it on the PC as the graphics are better and the mouse/keyboard combo is far better for me. But I have so many more laughs playing with my friends than being a lonely old git.

MMM, Cat flavored Peanut Butter!

On the otherhand, I have gotten back into my favorite game of all time: Eve Online. Which can only be played on the PC. The amount of pure brainjuice needed for this game is intense and is an experience I can’t get on the pick-up-and-play console. Neither can I go into it just for a dabble as it takes at least 30 minutes to do anything constructive.

2 years ago I would have been predicting the demise of PC gaming but recently I have had an epiphany (it didn’t hurt but thanks for asking). I have started work here in Greece in tech support of home PCs and have a very clear view of the situation in the PC market: XP sucks, Vista rulez. Most clients who have a problem are still running XP on a 3+ years old machine, the few clients I see with Vista and a newer computer I will see only once for a configuation change, not a technical error. And then I tried to remember the last time I had to hack my registry on my Vista computer, or edit the config.sys or do any of the million and 1 tweaks required to get XP limping along for another 6 months. And I haven’t; once my computer was setup, I haven’t had to change anything. In otherwords, it has become as stable as my XBOX360. I turn it on and it just works.

The only time a Vista machine should go wrong is if the dumb-ass user has downloaded a virus, installed a “free” game or any of the other stupidities that PC users are inclined too. Thererfore getting back to the problem now being that of culture. But as a gaming platform, it is still alive and strong and lends itself to games that the console doesn’t, and viceversa.

In conclusion….go get another credit card, buy yourself both platforms and default on the payments and cause another bank to collapse.

Confessions of a Whore

“If you have something to confess, do it now. Give yourself some peace“.

Last night I Achievement Whored.

Well, sort of, as we’ll see… however more accurately I helped out a friend by setting up his attempt to ‘glitch’ Left 4 Dead to allow him to get an Achievement that is very difficult to unlock under normal play conditions. I actually only agreed to do this, because this particular glitch would only affect him – only he’d get the Achievement, and I wouldn’t. Which was exactly what I wanted, because if I unlocked this Achievement I would only find any satisfaction in it by doing it under proper play conditions – so I actively want to leave it locked as a potential goal for another time.

As I discussed the Achievements of L4D more with him, it was obvious there was quite a few “workaround” ways to get many of the Achievements on this game. Glitches like this were pretty complicated, but there were the far more obvious ones like putting it on the easiest difficulty setting, specifically playing solo, or with a group of 4, or the classic the ‘2nd controller’ offline ‘multiplayer’ mode. My friend was quite willing to use any or all of these techniques in The Quest for the Holy Unlock.

However, to defend my friend, as he’s not exactly an iWin controller-using baboon, he specifically didn’t ruin anyone else’s play session in his self-admitted Achievement Whoring, in fact, he explained he doesn’t like playing online competitive or even co-operative  games at all in general – due the the problem of most ‘pick up group’ players being total dickshits – a problem I do sympathise with entirely. So he actually chooses to get even the “Versus” mode Achievements via ‘exploits’ in only offline play where he can.

I came to the firmer conclusion that as I’d already suspected, and like so many games, L4D has some very poorly conceived Achievements.  So it won’t really interest me to try and get some of them at all because of this failure in the game’s design. However, it got me thinking further; why does my “Whoring” friend do it? Whereas I see this gamerscore meta-game as one not worth playing, except in particular circumstances, for the reasons explained in my previous take on Achievements (and also covered in an excellent post on Not Rocket Science too), my friend here was actively engaged in this meta-game and clearly deriving fun from it. I got the sense that he enjoyed for the feeling of completeness he got from getting the Achievements – even via any ‘unintended’ means necessary. Regardless of the method it still made him feel like he’d ‘finished’ the game (or finished a greater portion of). When I asked him about it more, this seemed to fit. He’s the type of player, of which I know many, that generally just plays any game through once, just to ’see the story’ and finish the game, and won’t care if he does it on easy mode or whatever as he doesn’t really necessary want the challenge or the potential frustration along with it. As for collecting achievements he said he mostly did it on a whim, as if it was almost an unconcious decision – and that he doesn’t do it for most games. But for certain games, like L4D, he’d decided he wanted to try to get as many Achievements as he possibly could – and any he was frustrated by not being able to get via ‘normal play’ he was happy to try and unlock via any other method, not for the gamerscore but just because he wanted to and he could. To me this was more the stance of a “collector”, and although surely not mutually exclusive, it does seem to be somewhat different than the ‘badge of honour’ (or skill or knowledge if you like) motivation that is more typical of the Achievement ‘hunter’. Which, when it results in ‘boosting’ play, I see as merely a cheaters perversion of  my own attitude to Achievements. Ie: potentially fun sub-goals and also records of what I consider real fun accomplishments in a game – hence why I refuse to take any measures to shortcut the fun I find in working towards those records.

Hmm, wrong image search...

Once the L4D unlock glitch had been ‘acheived’ though, I started having a quick play on the free demo of Ikaruga. It is on offer to Gold members this week for the paltry sum of 400 MSP, which is only about 3 pounds. I commented at the time in XBL chat that it seems almost rude not to buy it for such a cheap price as it’s a pretty good game that once-upon-a-time I had been totally hyped about… however that’s exactly the issue with it for me. I had it on the Dreamcast, I played it on the Dreamcast, and I still have a Dreamcast hooked up, right there next to my XBox 360 (albeit on an SD-TV as the DC’s lower resolution tends to look better). So really, why was I even  seriously considering spending extra cash on this game, that I could play for no additional cost, and could’ve played ‘for free’ at any point before now too?

Was it just for the higher fidelity graphics? Was it just for the online multiplayer, or the convenience of having it on my “main” console (& TV).. ? Perhaps… but when I found myself actually opening up the Achievements list to decide whether to buy the game or not it hit me. Had I unwittingly turned into some lesser varient of an Achievement Whore myself.. ? Was I really considering spending money just to get some gamerscore? With some relief as I analysed myself, I realised this wasn’t the case.

The main reason I cared about the Achievements was to see if they would give me a new viable “goal” that would make me want to re-play the game again, but the other more surprising reason to me, was that the Achievements, and the online nature of my XBL account itself, were also providing a means for me to to potentially be able to show my respect for the game & it’s developers in a very tangible fashion. If I bought & played the game it would show on my gamercard online on things like this blog and social networks. XBL Friends would see me playing the game. Ikaruga! It’s friggin’ hardcore Treasure shmup! Or if I unlocked an Achievement, I would be able to post it to my facebook newsfeed, and friends would see I was playing this game. I could easily display my liking for Treasure, others might see it and comment, ask what it is, or choose to play the game co-operatively with me or challenge my scores and the like…. I realised it was all of this that was actually the deciding factor in getting the game and playing it again. I don’t know what this says about my style of play – I suspect nothing really. The fact that such non-game features feature into my buying & playing decisions probably says more about me as a person than a gamer really – and just how much I like games in general!

Role Inversion

Ok, it’s high time I published the results from the Inversion Survey. A disappointing response on this blog and on XBL I have to admit, but at least I got a good response from my facebook page

 

Skill Level	Inverted FPS	Inverted 3PS	Inverted 3PA
Remy77077 PAD	2	y	y	y
Remy77077 MOUSE	2	n
Navan Daughn PAD	1	n	n	n
Navan Daughn MOUSE	4	n	n	n
GA	1	n	n	n
Dydus	5	y	y	y
RB	1	y	n	n
SH	1	y	y	n
Grymbok	2	y	y	y
adammk	2	n	n	n
Hachimaki	4	y	y	y
McMond	2	n	n	n
Lom2112	4	y

 

My hypotheses before this survey were the following:

1. What comes most ‘naturally’ to you is what you initially learnt from. Someone who played lots of flight sims, or arcade flying games would be affected by each initial learning sticking with them. Also someone who played lots of “crosshairs” games, such as Operation Wolf, before they played an FPS could be affected by learning that.

2. People who invert visualise their game differently. They visualise themselves as the character more, and changing the view is akin to moving their whole head about. It’s like moving ‘a joystick on your head’. People who don’t invert simply see themselves as the crosshair – more like they are visualising themselves as just the eyes of the character, or even the gun-sight.

3. There would be a performance related correlation that the non-inverters had a ‘faster’ kind of visualisation that would be helpful in making them better players (& more likely to become skilled and experienced at FPS type of games).

4. People would generally stick with one control method throughout all kinds of games – and if they changed it, it could well be to do with a change in how they visualised in that style of game.

 

Now clearly this isn’t nearly enough data, nor even enough questions, to make any kind of analysis other than anecdotal, but a few things stood out.

There wasn’t a clear correlation between highly skilled & experienced FPS players and not-inverting as myself and Navan suspected. This gives me a lot of hope that I should continue to play ‘my own style’ without feeling I am being unduely hampered by my choice of controls.

Secondly, I feel if I was to do this survey again and do it more widely, I think I certainly need to break down the difference between playing on a gamepad and playing on a mouse. When I initiated this I did so on the assumption that most people would play the same on either type of control, however I suspect the majority of answers to this were from a gamepad perspective, and also during the period between when I made this survey and this response to it, I had installed and played Half Life 1 on my PC, so was playing an FPS on a mouse for the first time in years. And bizarrely I discovered that without even realising it for many hours of play, I was playing without invert on. As yet I have no idea what has changed for me, as I am certain I used to play on invert on a mouse as well as on a pad.

Some of the most interesting responses I got were actually commentary as opposed to full survey answers, notably almost all of them correlated exactly with the hypotheses I started with -

• “I always play stick/mouse moves the way my characters head goes ie. I push forward I look down, backwards I look up. Same goes for flight based stuff”
• “For whatever reason, un-inverted controls make no sense to me at all. My best guess is that on some odd level I’m viewing the mouse/joystick as an analogue for my “head” in the game. Push the top of your head forward, and you look down, etc.”
• “..it might be interesting to see if there is a correlation with motion sickness for the inverters”
• “Remy77077’s head/crosshair theory fits here. I’m basically using whatever controls I have at my disposal to move a pointer around the screen, rather than trying to push my characters head around. “
• I have a simple explanation as to why I invert the mouse, I learned how to fly before I ever played any computer games with a mouse

Unfortunately I don’t feel I am going anywhere further with this right now. As I joked on facebook “..when I get my research budget”. This is definitely a really interesting area of games analysis for me, but I feel its a really complex area too, and there doesn’t seem to be any simple answers. A really detailed and wide-reaching survey would have to be done, that’s far beyond my scope and the scope of this little blog to entertain. If only I could quit my day-job eh?

The Curious Orange

Here’s my followup to my previous post about how I am getting on with The Orange Box now.

I’ve finished all the ‘basic’ levels on Portal now. At first I absolutely hated it, as I do almost everything played from the irrevocably flawed FPS perspective. The fact that in an FPS every time I walk into a new area I have to manually move my tiny scope-like perspective viewpoint all around just to get an idea of my surroundings is a constant background irritation that will just not go away for me. But I’ve probably said enough about Dalek simulators and 10 degree views previously…

A Dalek by my incredibly artistically skilled friend, MightyOtaking! Click to visit his impressive DA Gallery

In any case after more play I did find it was fun in small doses for me, at least I wasn’t being shot at whilst looking around, but the game still did tend to quickly become frustrating, again, mainly due to having to play things from the FPS perspective. Most of the time I would work out how to do a puzzle without issue, only to have to do it over and over and over again purely due to the fact I either can’t tell exactly where I am standing, being reduced to a disembodied floating gun with nary a pair of feet, or because I miss a jump or can’t aim accurately or fast enough. At one point it got so bad that I was thinking there was no way I would want to play through the whole of the game. This kind of gameplay should never be done in an FPS to me, it’s simply the worst perspective ever to do anything akin to platforming. Thankfully though after only a few bad levels it moved away from ‘fps platform skills’ and more back to the focus being on the puzzles, which was much preferable.

There is definitely a huge feeling of laziness on the part of the developers when it comes to this game. Although I’ve not played it on PC, it just doesn’t seem to be a very good port to me, or rather, it’s just an incredibly straight port. Obviously Valve (with a nod to Blizzard) are probably the biggest proponents of the PC as a gaming platform, but I still don’t think it serves them especially well to do such lazy ports to the 360. There seemed to be too much in Portal that smacked of ‘fps mouse skills without a mouse’. Now the daft thing is, for me, a twin-stick gamepad is far more natural (and fun!) to control than keyboard & mouse (even though that was what I first played FPS’s with for years), but there’ll be no argument whatsoever for me that for the kind of swift rotation manoeuvres required at times in Portal, or for high level play in FPS’s in general, is far easier on keyboard & mouse. I’ve played Valve’s later Left 4 Dead conversion on the XBox 360 a little now, and that suffers from an identical problem, although at least they added a ‘quick 180 turn’ button for consoles.

(stolen from the Gameshadow blog - please click to visit )

The puzzles in Portal though all ended up being really simple compared to Braid. In fact I find Braid really is quite a comparable game to Portal, and one that is far superior I feel. Even though I am not a huge fan of puzzlers, Braid is simply so beautiful, being in gorgeous 2D with fantastic music, that Portal seems really ugly and simple by comparison. I also got stuck numerous times in Braid, and whilst I’ve been critical of Braid earlier about some of the reasons for that, I was actually fairly disappointed that I only got stuck to anything resembling the same degree once in Portal. And that was on the final level. And it eventually transpired the only reason I was stuck, was that I simply hadn’t seen something correctly, hamstrung as I was behind the blinkered view from my eyestork . One of the things that many people praise Portal for, it’s sense of humour, also pretty much fell flat on me. Not that it wasn’t amusing, it was, it’s just that I’d heard all these ‘hilarious’ jokes so many times over from my spoilering friends (despite my requests that they don’t do that!), and unconsciously over the internet, that they were already completely stale to me. Although I like it, there are far more appealing deserts than cake, especially stale cake. Even the Portal end song; as soon as it started playing, I realised I’d heard it before, or perhaps a mickey take of it, I can’t remember, other than the dry feeling of “seen/heard this before”. I’d predicted the ending almost from the start too, so it was all just rather yawn-inducing, sadly. It’s not really the game’s fault, but it is unfortunate that “the internet broke it” when it came to much of the vaunted humour for me. The funniest moment in the game for me, came from the differences in the subtitles compared to the actual speech of the automatic gun units – and I am not even sure if that was 100% intentional, although I’d like to think it was.

All in all though, Portal was certainly at least worth playing.

Half Life 2 however, seemed to be going from bad to worse for me. I have now discovered that you can save anywhere. Now, whilst I might be mocked for not realising this until a significant way into the game, the idea simply didn’t occur to me, especially given that the game tells you about the checkpointing system on entry. This removes some of my issues with the gameplay, but adds a whole raft of new ones. There is basically no challenge now other than getting stuck and not being able to figure out where to go next. And actually, despite Portal claiming to be the ‘puzzle game’ of The Box, I’ve gotten stuck far more in Half Life 2 than I ever did in Portal! Right where I am saved at the time of writing this in fact, I seem to be stuck at a ladder that simply won’t let me climb up it for no known reason – hopefully I’ll be able to figure this out later. Half Life 2 does seem to be simply awful though, even for an FPS. The lack of atmosphere & poor level design simply astounds me at times for a game with such a hyped reputation. You simply get an obvious hectic ‘action segment’, then the game practically pauses for an obvious story or puzzle segment. The method of saving anywhere is also an immense problem for the gameplay as it destroys almost any attempts at pacing or at inducing much in the way of a fiero emotional connection with the game. As much as I hated being re-spawned a couple of hits from death constantly, it’s far better than repeating this scenario: Save, walk into a room, get damaged a bit, then simply reload once you’ve learnt where the enemies are, re-play and kill them all easily. Compared to current FPS games it seems just so poorly designed. In my opinion to be considered a true classic a game ought to be able to stand the test of time, not merely rely on novelty or even innovation; this game is clearly no Street Fighter 2, even within it’s own genre. I am not sure the precise age of this game, but will people still be playing this 15 years later? I really doubt it.

Team Fortress 2 however has moved from a F Grade to something around a C+ for me. Thanks to the kind efforts of a friend (Grymbok) teaming up over XBox Live I actually got some useful tutoring and some of the gameplay started to emerge. We played through a bunch of different maps, constantly chattering about the game and how to do things. We attempted to talk with our teammates, yet again, there was relatively little communication compared to when I play other games of this ilk, and annoying pointless flaws like voice comms cutting out when you are respawning meant we were soon back to a private chat room. As per Valve’s aforementioned laziness, it’s a real shame the controls and motion wasn’t rejigged even slightly for a console once again though, as it’s feels too fast and ’spazzy’ in its combat system at times, especially the Scout & Assassin who seem to have the potential to be simply ridiculous. At least you know it’s a level playing field though. But it still feels at these moments as though you really are playing a PC game really intended for mouse control, filtered through your gamepad. One other factor I find bemusing about TF2 is that, like all these games, being nothing more than a disembodied gun means that you have almost no feeling of ‘presence’ in the game. You do get used to it, but being able to walk cleanly through my teammates is incredibly odd to me, it also is a huge reason why melee attacks feel so ‘wrong’ in this game; and any other FPS with this problem, when compared to a game where they feel so ‘right’ and solid, like the Halo series.

Yet I could see real potential in the fun of this if only I could get in a good team of friends that tried to talk & work together properly, even at low-level play; basically, I’m talking about Team Shitty Shotty Although to get good at TF2 would still involve a lot of my greatest bugbear with high-level FPS play: map learning. This is simply one of the least interesting game tasks imaginable to me (I’d rather grind on an MMO!), its one reason I generally can’t stand driving games, ‘music’ games, and also generally prefer fighting games with much smaller movesets. At least TF2 comes with a small selection of maps though, so at some point if I play it enough I won’t be hopelessly lost running about aimlessly, as I am much of the time currently. Even so, this kind of rote-learning against static data is rarely much fun for me in itself. I’ve said many times that the first online multiplayer FPS that I’ll potentially truly enjoy will be one with some kind of random map generation, so no-one can ‘learn’ the map or weapon drops etc. Everyone would have to work together and think on their feet, which would get directly to the actual fun elements of gameplay for me. I wish game design technology would catch up on this kind of gameplay feature, rather than just ever increasing graphical standards. I guess that Left For Dead’s AI Director is a step in the right direction, and likewise the different-each-time encounter AI for Gears of War and Halo; even they are only for the ’story play’. It’s notable though that I did get interested enough in Team Fortress 2 to reset all my corrupted ‘personal best’ scores on it, by fiddling with my 360’s save data. This also reset all of my “partial” achievements on The Orange Box though But I doubt I’d ever get the ‘lambda locator’ one in Half Life 2, nor the camera-destroying one in Portal anyway.  Also, I suspect these “personal bests” interest me more than the Achievements do anyway.

I’m still intending to play more of all the games on The Orange Box though. One of reasons is a particularly odd one though – it’s thanks to Gears of War (1 and 2). I intend to write in future about why I find these games far superior to any FPS, and because of this I enjoy them enough to play them enough, that I get an odd side-effect of becoming far more proficient with FPS-style control, so that FPS’s themselves become more fun and playable for me. I even started to barely be irritated playing Half Life 2 the other day, which was shocking for me. I also found that I’ve had to change my mindset to play the game. I now see it not like a normal skill or mental orientated gaming challenge, but more like a ‘grinding’ game (‘c-RPG’ game in the tradtional genre misnomer) where progression is guaranteed, and it’s more about power-gaming the logistical side of things and simply seeing the game through; even if it’s just for the story. In fact, HL2 keeps adding more wrinkles to the story that appear interesting to me, if only I had any clue what was going on! This one of the reasons, that, wonder of wonders, I’ve actually been inspired to download Half Life for my PC & I intend to play it. Partly as I now want to compare how I feel on a keyboard and mouse after playing all these twin-stick FPS games, but admittedly the main factor was that it was reduced to less than a dollar for a while on Steam – which was all the excuse I needed as I’ve wanted to check out Steam more for some time. I’ve even found I’ve started to actually quite like the ’style’ in these Valve games, particularly in Team Fortress 2, even though it really had little initial appeal to me. I do suspect a lot of my positive feelings I’ve had has been due to the gamut of simply incredible gaming experiences I’ve had lately, spearheaded by HD Remix obviously (with honourable mentions to Gears of War 2 and multiplayer Bomberman Live), that actually seems to cause me to appreciate all my other games more too.

I also discovered I had to finish Portal again to get it to re-unlock the “advanced” levels after my Team Fortress 2 inspired save game reset, but luckily I had a point save seconds from the end of the game. I’ve found that most of my friends who played Portal didn’t bother with these Advanced levels, which I feel is telling about the actual gameplay. That said, I know lordnaff did do most of them, the FPS & puzzle-game loving fool . However once I started to attempt one of these Advanced levels myself, I found it had been changed from an interesting thought puzzle, to yet more of the dull ‘mouse-on-a-gamepad’ platform skills type of challenge. I figured out what to do, yet I kept missing a jump and dying. So I saved and jumped, reloaded, tried again, reloaded, tried again… I know “Try Again” is one of my favourite songs of all time, but it really wasn’t meant to apply here… I somewhat doubt I’ll be getting into these extra levels.

Overall, I’d still have the give The Orange Box my highest ever rating: One Turd.

Inversion Survey

This is something that’s been intriguing me and I’ve been working on a blog post on for some time, but I realised it would be far more intesting to try and get some data from my friends and any readers of this blog who’d like to get involved too, before actually discussing it further. So please put your answers in the comments, or message to me in any manner is fine (XBL, myspace, email etc.).

Thank you very much in advance to everyone that participates

1. Rank on a scale of 1-5 how skilled & experienced do you consider your play at First Person Shooter (FPS) games, 5 being the highest. (If you have an XBL account it would be helpful if you told me it as well to compare Achievements)

2. When you play an FPS game, do you play with look inversion (Y-axis inversion) on?

3. When you play a third person action game with shooting elements (such as Gears of War, Ninja Gaiden aim mode, Gun Valkyrie, World of Warcraft etc), do you play with look inversion (Y-axis inversion) on?

4. When you play a third person more movement-based adventure style game (such as Tomb Raider, Uncharted, Ninja Gaiden etc), do you play with look inversion (Y-axis inversion) on?

Any more comments associated with your thoughts on this, especially if you change your look invert settings from game to game I would be really interested in hearing your thoughts on why you prefer that. Ninja Gaiden is especially potentially interesting as of course you can have different look invert settings when in “aim mode” compared to the normal game view.

Personally, I’d rank myself a 2 for FPS game skill & experience. I’ve played an awful lot of games but I certainly don’t play as many as a lot of folks do, and I’ve never gotten especially good at any of them. On single player I usually only play through them once. And online multiplayer I don’t tend to “know” any of the maps very well when I play FPS games, or even have an average ranking on games like Halo 3. However I am far from a ‘noob’ and can generally hold my own on any game once I’ve played it a little bit. I play every single style of game with look inversion on - so pressing “up” always looks down for me.

-=Lordnaff=-
Here’s my answer to your survey

1. XBOX FPS rank: 1
PC FPS rank: 4
2. Not inverted
3. Not inverted
4. Not inverted

The reason that I don’t invert the y-axis is because when I have accidentally done it in the past, I got instant RSI, eye-strain, back cramps, irritable bowel syndrome, epilepsy and Aids.

Orange.. Wednesday?

The Orange Box: Day 1.

Well at the insistent urging of my colleague, friend & co-blogger lordnaff I eventually found a copy cheap enough to get.

So to tie in with my ideas on time-based reviews and things that could be added to XBox Live, here’s how I got on with Orange Box after my first forays at it (3 Achievements!) for a few hours last night. Warning, this is going to be unavoidably negative in places, much moreso than I would normally ever blog. However I was planning a post regarding my problems with the FPS genre as a whole, but instead I’ve also included a lot of those points here. So if you’re a big close-minded fan of FPS’s.. please look away now!

As a multiplayer-competition loving goon, the first game on “the Box” I decided to try, naturally, was Team Fortress 2. I already knew it was a pure MP thing, but I hoping for some kind of practice mode. Bots or something maybe? Umm.. nope. Nothing. So instead I booted a LAN game solo and after waiting for a 15 second countdown, to check I was really sure I was ready with myself, it did actually allow me to run around the map on my own, read the character classes and get a few basic tips & figure out the controls before without having to go in totally cold to a multiplayer game. It’s cool that there was some way to do this, but why hide it? Then I ended the game and got a congratulatory message for the longest time alive with the Medic or something. 15 minutes. Oh great, so my attempts at practice have ruined that part of my ‘high score’ stats now too. What a poor interface: This isn’t starting out well for TF2.

Anyway, I have the raw basics of the game down at least, although reloading on the B-button is proving to be an absolute nightmare for those used to Gears and Halo like me. Why on earth would you change that? But it’s time to leap into a Player Match on the same map I’d just ran around. Oddly.. there doesn’t seem to be any lobby, I am dropped straight into a game in progress. It seems to be a 3 v 3 game.

“Hello” I call over mic, to silence. “Anyone there?… Can you hear me?”. I run around for a good few minutes without seeing a single person. I hear intercom messages about ‘the intelligence’ being taken and stuff, so I know others must be there somewhere, but that’s all I get. Eventually I find someone on my team and get near to them and again call out; again with silence as the response. I was wondering if they could only hear me in close character proximity in-game. But it seemed to make no difference. I decide to follow my ‘teammate’ and sure enough I eventually find someone to shoot. A very brief firefight ensued and the usual spazzing about ‘figure-of-8 dancing’ that is all so common in the generally laughably-unrealistic FPS genre occured. I am pretty sure I got killed by a smack to the back of my head or something, although it was hard to tell, as I wasn’t left with any nice view of how I died or anything. The characters seemed to move way too fast to me, really hurting any attempt at tactical combat, not to mention how few hits seem to kill. The movements & attacks felt really jerky and non-fluid. It all seemed to heighten the sheer spazziness of it. As I’ve often felt with FPS games, it did accurately portray a gunfight between two people who had stuck traffic cones over their heads.

Eventually the opposing team ‘won’ the match and I noticed people seemed to be joining and leaving during the game too. But instead of a win/loss screen – it just seemed to restart immediately on another match with the same teams. I was getting bored with no-one to ask advice or anything, and then suddenly it popped up with “The Host has left”.

Maybe it was just a bad group? So the next match I enter the same map but this time one already full with 15 players, as I noticed it had felt extremely empty on that map. “Hello” I said once again as I was dropped instantly into a mid-game. Thankfully this time, someone answers. So it turns out you can actually hear everyone else on the same team. I explain I’m totally new to this and wanting some advice, and the young fella seems happy to help out – also, I notice no-one else seems to be really working as a team much at all. There’s no other communication going on so it doesn’t really matter that we’re talking about what the character classes and weapons over the game’s team channel. I try out a bunch of different classes but I couldn’t seem to get anywhere really with anyone other than the rocket-launcher Soldier who I am getting quite a few kills with at least.

Neither team seems to be be able to make any headway at all at actually gaining the objective. 8 v 8 seemed that it was impossible for either side to crack their defenses. Wandering into the enemy ‘base’ alone I could find no safe way in at all, and even following others in didn’t seem to help. I eventually ended up in a one to one chat with my helpful teammate because the game actually blocks the chat while one or other of us are respawning – but with no indication of this fact, I wasn’t aware I was in fact talking to myself half the time. Another gawp-inducingly moronic hole in the interface then. With the score on 0-0 for ages, the game eventually initiates “Sudden Death” mode which my teammate explains. A couple of minutes into this, without seeing any enemy… “The Host has left”. Oh dear. Well… I’m not really having much fun at this, so despite the fact I am really grateful to my teammate for chatting with me, I decide to go and try something else.

Overall, I can’t see why anyone would play this over Halo 3 at this point. The class selection is a very nice idea and it’s much better than running about the map to learn weapon spawn points. If I want a rocket launcher, I can play with one. That is great.

However for absolutely everything else Halo dumps on it from a stratospheric height. I am also pretty sure there is no party-play & a lack of good matchmaking… However I understand that some features may be a lot better in ranked matches, so I’ll certainly give it another try later. But when you’re looking at a bad interface, worse graphics, worse controls, and seemingly to me at this point far worse gameplay than the most obvious competitor that springs to mind… I’m left wondering why? Even the potential for the vaunted class-based teamwork seems much lower than in Halo without party play & with the flaws with the in-game communication.

So, time to try something else. Let’s start at the beginning with Half-Life 2 then I thought.

 

First impression – well the graphics don’t exactly seem cutting edge but, well, this started out really interesting. I was really impressed by the voicing and I at least seem to quickly grasp some sense of what was going on with the controls etc. The storyline seemed to be really interesting. Who were these overseer-type class? Who was that white-haired man talking over the viewscreens all the time with the really Equillibrium/1984 style stuff… I felt the urge to want to agree with them and assume they really were beneficial just to see how it played out. I wonder how things would get revealed…  but then BAM. It was ruined. My heart sunk – you were already supposed to know that actually, the new ‘ruling class’ people are actually aliens now controlling the earth and they most definitely are the bad guys ™ and you should shoot them in the face immediately all without any qualms at all. No grey areas allowed sir! (but it goes so well with orange).

My interest in the story was almost immediately lessened to the mere curiosity that I get with 99% of videogame storylines.

Even worse, you were clearly supposed to know half the characters already. That’s to be expected I suppose for a sequal.. but it’s not much fun for anyone when you haven’t even brought the game out on the same console. At the very least I expected some kind of storyline prelude summary in the manual. Nope, nothing. Apart from a vague explanation that it was somehow my characters fault that unleashed a lot of this bad stuff ™.

Also.. as good as the speech was, because it was fading in & out as I approached people, and because of the loud voice over the top from the white-haired dude, I kept feeling I was missing things. I restarted a section with the subtitles on, and sure enough, there had been masses of speech I hadn’t heard, that made things a lot more playable and understandable.

Anyway, I got through the first few introductory sections still rather interested, if feeling really let down by the fact the big story ‘reveal’ had already prematurely spilt itself everywhere before the game had even begun. Then finally we get to the more ‘action’ section of the game proper, and finally a I get a pipe! Aaah. This is about the only thing fun I can remember from my brief plays on the PC Half-Life – playing MP matches purely to smack some sniper-rifling camping idiot in the face with a lead pipe.

But I notice the control still feels rather clunky though. Smacking down some crates with the pipe to get through a gap or picking up and dropping things and manouvring objects is a nice feature, but for me it just highlights how bad the first person viewpoint is for this kind of thing. Unlike in third person, sideways-on.. or even you, know, real life, it’s really hard to judge where objects are in relation to everything else around you when you are blessed with a Dalek-like “10 degree view” of the world. Perhaps it should be called 10% Life rather than Half-Life?

I can still see way more from behind a Dalek than in any FPS game

As I got a gun and firefights ensued, it just got even worse. It made me realise how important a feature the ’scanner’ in an FPS (like Halo has) is for adding any kind of realistic awareness of your surroundings. The “hit direction” indicators in Half Life 2 just didn’t seem to work properly at all either. I repeatedly got killed wondering “what the ****” was killing me. The worst case was when I was wandering along and suddenly couldn’t move, and my health dropped to zero. What on earth? On a later repetition I discover I’d been grabbed by some overhead egg-type alien thing. Fair enough, but why not pan the camera up automatically to, you know, let the player have some clue that his face is eaten off? Or better still.. here’s a crazy idea. How about making this game in something other than a first-person view in the first place?

I’m getting shot again and wondering where from.. so I try to backtrack into the cave-like area I’d just poked my head out from, but no.. I just stand still and die. Obviously this was because there was a tiny step on the ground that my character couldn’t backstep up over and, naturally, he had absolutely no awareness of it’s presence. Silly Gordan Freeman-Face! Another time it would seem my elbow got caught against a door corner in exactly the same fashion as I stood there getting shot. A problem I’m sure we’ve all faced in real life.. I’ve seen so many people stuck by their elbows in doorways when they don’t think to even move their arm, or maybe, you know, look out around the door frame rather than being forced to walk through it to get any view of what’s the other side. But of course.. you’d have to make something like Gears of War for that to work in a video game.

I also notice I’m repeatedly running through reasonably sized areas, but with really no clue as to where I’m supposed to be going. All the while being shot at. Again, it makes me realise how much better games have become these days to attempt to overcome these shortcomings of the FPS genre with objective and direction markers and map overlays for example. I got lost numerous times and died a few times before I found the ladder I hadn’t seen, or went in the right direction, or found the barrel I had to smash or explode.

All these things then seemed to combine on one particularly nasty section. I’d narrowly escaped some exploding barrels, and scraped through running down inside some pipes. I then walked out and got slaughtered by overhead gunmen. Ah, I forgot to mention until now that all enemies in this game seem psychically linked to your precise location at all times – the moment you step out of anywhere, or look through a hole in a wall, you will be shot. Even helicopters wheeling through city streets overhead are able to track you to almost sniper-like accuracy. I suppose it’s good practice for multiplayer. Anyway, I respawned and stepped out again, having learnt where the enemies where. I shot the first 2.. then more poured out and I died again. Respawn again.. and I notice each time I am starting this section with only 30% health. And I had no option to not save, no option to backtrack to find more health.

Not since I almost smashed the disk of Final Fantasy Tactics on the Playstation 1 have I seen such a game with such an atrocious save game interface that seems purely designed to screw over the player & perhaps artificially ramp up the challenge. It’s worse knowing that in all likelihood on the PC it had no checkpoints and the player could likely save anywhere and as often as they liked, and could manually backtrack to any previous saves they wanted. That kind of system also ruins games in it’s own way, but it wasn’t anything like this. Checkpoints are a great idea, but this was just so poorly designed as to be even worse than the save-anywhere method. I still eventually got through this section, but it left a really bitter taste in the mouth and resentment in my head.

Unfortunately the game seems all about repeatedly doing the same section over and over until you learn where the enemies are, where you are supposed to be going, where the ammo is. I don’t really feel much fun or progression from doing this. This is a definitive hallmark of all those bad PC games I’ve left behind. I’d heard Half-Life was meant to be immersive? Well it’s impossible to be immersed when you are dying over and over again and having to ‘learn’ sections of the game. Even good set pieces that should feel cinematic don’t really work when you see them over and over. I daren’t even compare it to something like Halo or Gears of War, as Half-Life 2 is so hopelessly outclassed on this front by games like these that it doesn’t even seem like a fair comparison.

I guess I was expecting too much. Worst of all, I was simply getting rather bored playing it. So bored in fact, I was periodically pausing the game and chatting & browsing on a PC while ‘getting through it’. This really isn’t a good sign when I’m only just starting a new game.

Oh and don’t even get me started on the torch! *mad glare*

The only point (past the very first level) where the game really entertained me was with the Achievements. The first one I got in the game was possibly the funniest and most accurate achievement for me personally I’ll ever receive, and when I was getting a bit frustrated with the game and it gave me “Malcontent” achievement, I did think this was a genius of programming to have read my mind like that.

Anyway, despite all this negativity, it’s still a game I feel I can still play more of. It’s reputation alone means it deserves more of my time. Who knows, in a few weeks or months I could completely change my opinion. But for now, I give this game my highest ever rating: One Turd

One team has STICK!

Team Shitty Shotty enlisted a new member last night, wildpaintings, and the team went on another foolery-filled rampage on Halolz. I suspect that wildpaintings maybe in danger of demotion from TSS however, as he led the Team to their dramatic first ever win. 50 to 49!

The game started off badly, with a member of the opposing team immediately making it onto both my ‘Mute’ and ‘Avoid Player – Communication’ lists before the game even began for his ridiculously annoying screeching in the lobby. But there were no drops, and a nice lag-free game that was incredibly close on score all the way… with myself dealing the, not-at-all-lucky-honest, final kill to the enemy team as Navan Daughn distracted the enemy from the flank:

Much whooping and cheering ensued as the glory of Team Shitty Shotty lit up the rankings leaderboard… umm, well not quite. It was only a Casual Team Slayer game. Still, some delicious fiero in the face of agon was certainly felt all-round.

We even won again just a couple of games later, but it wasn’t even close, as the opponents were all on split-screens and one seemed to have turned into a stationary target practice dummy for reasonable periods of time which made the win rather anti-climatic after the previous excitement. However TSS was also fairly close to pulling off an upset in a number of other matchups against far more experienced and skilled opponents thoughout the evening. Definitely improvement was being seen in fact. I will attempt to counter this alarming trend with alcohol next time.

The next challenge is for Team Shitty Shotty to steal a victory from the pansies in a Ranked Match game, and perhaps to take their honed skills into other game arenas.

It was a rather good night of other gaming on top of this as well for me. I once again had some great Street Fighter AE matches with The Uberwarlock, who is an awesome Street Fighter opponent for me always. As usual, I was losing to him, but at least my game was reasonable this time – I even managed to beat his ‘Gief once. A fantastic challenge.

And, much later, I got out of bed for an insonmia-fueled 5am completion of Braid. Both of the Agoners crew are big fans of Braid with lordnaff in particular declaring it one of the best games ever. Myself, I am hugely enamoured with its existence as a 2D game & it’s aesthetic and design ideals, and would have bought it almost no matter what I thought of the gameplay. But overall as an actual game for me, I just think it’s ‘rather good’. The dissappointments that lower it to that category for me are firstly that I became very irritated with the manner in which the obfuscated game mechanics became a part of the puzzle themselves on one too many occasion – a problem a decent tutorial or smarter level design could have easily allieviated; to at least let you understand what tools you had available. And secondly I am feeling really let down by the storyline switch-up in the ending, which was far more poorly delivered than expected, and has pretty much ruined the game’s narrative for me. Then again, I prefer some good emo angst to some hard-hitting plot twist; your tastes may vary. But, I am named after Remy for a reason!

Fight For Futility!