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.

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

FLOWG

Discussing such games as Lost Odyssey, Oblivion, Fable 2, and even Saints Row 2 with Navan Daughn and other friends of mine, I struck upon an idea of something that would really appeal to me.

One of the problems with these kinds of games is that they are such a huge time sink, but what makes this especially bad for me is that they are also almost completely solo experiences. Now this gives many advantages in their design for story potential, pacing, and the fact you shape the pace & initiation of the game events entirely; “you are the hero” as the catchphrase says, the illusion of roleplaying can be much stronger. However in general, I’d much prefer the multi-player aspects of an MMO. But an MMO of course brings with it all kinds of other issues. How do you have some kind of major player initiated world-impacting story or event, when 1000’s of players will all want to repeat that task. It’s why most of the storyline in such game worlds, is essentially a waste of time (outside of some of the meta-drama created in ‘true’ player worlds, such as Eve Online) as even in the best MMO virtual worlds ones you only really roleplay an immortal peon for the vast majority of players.

Which got me thinking, what about  a hybrid? What about a video game with a virtual world of some kind, but a virtual world limited in extent of the players involved in it. In fact, limited to the extent that you choose. To coin my own acronym: A FLOWG: A “Friends List Only World Game”.

To explain the concept further, imagine a game with some kind of free-roaming world, like Fable 2 or World of Warcraft, but one that had many player initiated features & effects, such as permanent housing for example. But rather than the world be overwhelmed with 1000s of players’ worth of houses, you’d only see the houses and effects of say, the 4-5, or even 100 people you’d invited to play the game with you.

Even things like certain unique quests could only be completed once in your ’shared’ virtual world. Of course the exact demarcations of how all these things played out would be down to the design of the game itself, exactly what crossover you had between the worlds and players. Adammk responded to this with “It would be a bit like a D&D party”… and yep that would be precisely my hope for this kind of thing when it came to an ‘c-RPG’ style game. Now of course one player could run off and “do all the quests” so no-one else could.. but the point is, why would you want to? The whole concept is one of mutual play with your friends. In the same manner I’ve not played a single level of Gears of War 2 on my own, why also would I want to play a hypothetical FLOWG on my own.

Of course there are technical issues I can foresee especially around adding/deleting friends as you go along, and scalability based around how many people was the limit or the average for most players. But I really think the benefits and advantages of this kind of game design could be enormous, so much so that I am amazed that no-one’s really done anything like it yet.

One Year of Wasted Dreams

Without intending this to become a review site at all, I did waste over 120 hours of gaming playing Lost Odyssey during the last year, so I feel it would be remiss of me to let this experience pass by without some detailed Agoner musings on it. Note, there will be some spoilers in this post, so if that bothers you, please look away now – although of course I’d love it if you’d also come back and have a read later.

You may be questioning why someone with my general taste in games was even playing a Japanese RPG. Without getting into the topic of my history with JRPGs too heavily, in the past I have really enjoyed the very best of this genre (eg. Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy 6, Panzer Dragoon Saga). Yet I have been so utterly disgusted by the worst of this genre, that some of the games I consider the worst games ever made fall into this category – eg. Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics. In fact it was this phase of atrocious JRPG’s on the Sony Playstation that seemed to rip everything I loved out of the genre, cruelly destroying the gameplay I enjoyed with the combined assault of terrible 3d graphics, fixed story cut scenes, huge on-rails game sections, cutout characters and moronic game systems, that had led me to all but give up on JRPGs entirely. I’d certainly given up all hope with Squaresoft/Squenix.

However it had been a long time now, and I guess I didn’t really have high hopes for much anymore, but at least a game slightly apart from ‘mainstream’ JRPG crowd had a chance it could be better, so I took a look around. The other major reason I was looking for one was that I was specifically wanting a game on my 360 that I term a ‘mong’ game, by that I mean a game I can play when I am ‘monged out’ – ie: tired, distracted, eating etc. This meant I wanted it to have little-to-no arcade skills at all – as almost every other game I had on my 360 needed some. I tried out a few other titles like Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata, and even Western RPGs like Mass Effect, but all of them seemed to have too much of some kind of dexterity skill element in their games, whereas Lost Odyssey, short of it’s very easy and also non-essential ring attack system, had none at all. I also went into the game, and this critique, effectively blind on purpose, reading very little about it at all as I wanted to get away from any preconceptions I might have about this kind of game.

For a while, despite it suffering from many things I lament about the ‘modern’ JRPG, I was calling Lost Odyssey the first JRPG in years that didn’t annoy me. The game system didn’t seem to be moronic for a long time, but in the end, it did break down. Right from the start it contained the usual wealth of completely useless attacks and abilities, yet there did seem to also be an interesting set of viable options, at least for optimising and ‘power gaming’ that it kept things interesting, and I was very impressed to actually get killed by the first boss in the game. And oddly, that tiny bit of skill needed with the ring attacks did keep my interest, as it added an element to the combat that meant perfecting the logistics of any particular battle in the game was never an absolute certainty. However, by the mid to latter stages of the game I felt that I had completely broken the system. I was ending up coming out of every battle with a party of completely full health & magic with very little thought or clever tactics at all.

One of the problems was that even without purposefully trying to “level up” my main characters, the immortals, all reached the maximum experience level (99) long before the end of the game. Now I had deliberately tried to get all the available skills, showing the parts of my manager & hoarder nature when playing certain kinds of games, but it was only around level 94 or so I actually went for levelling, mainly just to see if 99 really was the maximum. One of the reasons for this was, appropriately perhaps given the title, I got so very lost many times. Whenever the areas became too maze-like I tended to get totally confused & ended up walking around in circles. I find that the fact that the random battles take you away from the main game screens (& maps) really disorientating, and the fact this was, as mentioned, a ‘mong game’ for me meant I was generally rather out of it and tired when playing it, really didn’t help. The excess of random battles I faced through getting lost repeatedly was very likely a contributing factor in making the game’s levelling curve seem bizarre to me.

In the end, almost without realising I was at the end of the game, I killed the “last boss” in only a handful of turns without any of my characters even ending up damaged at all. In fact, whilst I was annoyed that the game made me wait until it’s last disk to offer much in the way of any kind of open ended gameplay, it was precisely when this open ended portion kicked in that the gameplay started to break and playing started to drag & become really tedious. Perhaps it would have been better off being ‘on rails’ throughout, but the fact it was all contained in one final ‘free play’ section was almost as poor design really. The game became so very easy for so long, it felt kind of pointless to me. When I did complete it, as you might have guessed by my tone and the title of this post, I felt rather empty, like I’d wasted my time on this game, and not to mention slightly glad it was over. Yet I was also annoyed by the game for not delivering more. I didn’t feel interested to go and hunt for all the things I’d missed, which judging by the Achievements there are quite a few, and I certainly wasn’t enticed by the offer of yet more content, especially not soon after the NXE launched:

Worst use of MS Points ever?

Yet another game system issue was how homogeneous the characters became towards the end of the game. All of the  non-immortal characters ended up being little more than “skill feeders” for the immortals, so they offered nothing else once they had maxed their skills. And because any skill set can be mapped to any immortal, you ended up finding the perfect mix and then keeping them identical. And of course two of the characters’ natural weapons and stats meant they were obviously perfect for being front-line fighters and the other two meant they were perfect for being back-row casters, so why would you try anything else? All of the interesting options offered by the front / back row system, such as taunting from a back row, all soon became worthless to anyone wanting to optimise combat. As usual, so many abilities were pointless as they failed to take the hidden action cost of a characters turn into account. Some of them were so obviously pointless it beggared belief; notably some of the special attacks like a 3-hit combo attack that took two turns to do, when during the in the same time you could’ve done two 2-hit combos…

But back to the characters; literally the only interesting decision I found myself having to make in the game was which of my mortals to ‘take along for the ride’ – and even then, it ended up being an obvious choice, as Sed was the only character offering anything unique in the entire game in fact, with his ability to always ignore the enemies back-row guarding effect with his gun attacks. I also don’t doubt there would be a way to map even this ability onto the immortals too if I’d completed everything in the game. It really is exasperating to me to see every multi-character JRPG I’ve played since the SNES make this mistake. I can’t believe that the concept of having a mixed party of characters with each offering truly unique game abilities is the sole domain of Final Fantasy 6 still. It makes any game of this kind so much more interesting tactically.

It was also somewhat jarring for me to find this game actually forced me to take notes in places. Yes, actual literal pencil and paper notes. Now whilst this was something of a regular occurance in games in the distant past, it was pretty odd to have to do it these days, especially when most ‘RPG’ style games, not to mention MMORPGs have such detailed Quest systems and the like.

But, since this is an ‘RPG’ (even if it’s not at all really) what about the story? Well, for me, whilst the story can interest me a lot in a game, it’s really a very minor element, even for an ‘RPG’. It just isn’t the game. The reason I enjoy games and especially video games over all other forms of entertainment is for their interactive elements, and generally, that doesn’t include the story to any great degree. Again, this is a huge topic of discussion in itself, but suffice to say, like so many games I found the story in Lost Odyssey started out reasonably interesting & even touching at times, but ended up turning incredibly generic and boring, and then to worse.

What made this a really tragic shame for Odyssey, was that the immortal’s dream sequences, the “Thousand Years of Dreams” as the game calls them, were truly excellent. These were some of the best written pieces I’ve ever seen in any video game, and for a while, they seemed to really blend with and enhance the main story for the game. The dream sequences are just short stories of text, blended with music and generally static or slowly moving background graphics – the best examples of these became quite literally poetic in the way they blended the elements. Now whilst it does perhaps speak to my emotional state at times in the past year, and while it does nothing but prove a game has never made me cry, I did in fact get moved to tears a great deal of times by these narrative sections.

But once into the latter stages, instead of working with the main game story, they were actually pulling in opposite directions completely! It was as if they were written by completely different writers and teams; which in fact, they were. So as the game’s main plot descended to complete generic farce for the most part, with only touches of melodrama that appealed to me, the moving tragedies of the dream sequences became totally at odds with this. So in the ‘main game’ I’d be seeing some gobble-di-gook Star Trek “tech” explanation of how the immortal characters had come from some other dimension and had come into this other world to observe it’s effect on theirs or some other such mumbo-jumbo, and then a few minutes later I’d be seeing a morbidly emotional dream sequence where that same character would be questioning the reason for their immortal existence – which they, and more importantly you, the player, now had complete knowledge as to why.

I can’t really labour the starkness of this contrast enough, as it completely removed any vested interest I had in the the story or the characters. The main storyline ending was in fact simply atrocious in this regard, figuratively pissing over all of the earlier superb dream parts, seemingly laughing as it defecated on their every premise. You’ve witnessed harrowing thoughts on how soul-destroying immortality could actually be in terms of someone’s view on life, love, emotional state, war and philosophy. Then you are forced to bear witness to mortal and immortal characters chosing to get married and vowing to “love each other forever”… Now I’ve heard forever’s a long time, baby. Yeh, infinitely moreso for an immortal I’d imagine. The real final straw for me though was to hear the main character utter the immortal line “immortality’s not so bad…” without a care or consideration that he would outlive his fostered children that he was happily musing about bringing up.  It was almost as if it was mocking the player, assuming they would be too stupid to think of the flaws in what was being said, not to mention the writer of the Thousand Years of Dreams.

For my final thoughts though, I do wonder if I am simply too much of a challenge-seeking Agoner to ever really enjoy a game of this nature any more. But the fact remains that for large parts of the game I was enjoying it, even when it wasn’t especially challenging to actually ‘win’, it was challenging my ability to optimise and collect in a logistical play manner. I also even felt some fun of the Juggernaught player too. And dispatching the last boss with barely a scratch did unleash a small amount of fiero in me. Not that it proved to be actually challenging, but it was perhaps my own anticipation that it would be challenging that gave rise to this emotion perhaps. I have to completely agree that a good ‘c-RPG-style’ game is incredibly hard to make, and my big problem is, as much time as I do spend on video games, my time is still really limited. Why these games tend to annoy me the most, is that it often takes a very long time to figure out whether I even find them worth playing or not. It’s even given me doubts about playing other c-RPGs right now I had ‘on slate’, which included Oblivion, Mass Effect and perhaps one time in the very distant future, even Fallout 3.

For an excellent review and discussion on Lost Odyssey from a very different perspective to my own please also see: Lost Odyssey – “The (Real) Final Fantasy” on Metagame.

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.