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!

Sticks of Joy

A lot of people ask me “Remy77077, you play fighting games a lot, what joystick should I get?”.

Well okay, only a couple of people have asked me that.

You'll need a joystick to pull off moves like this

But since I’ve written about joysticks in the past too, I felt that this was a worthy topic for an update to the current situation. As that old article atests, I believe if you want to play fighting games properly, you do need to invest in a joystick.

The situation with multi-format sticks is still sadly pretty murky, and pretty much the same as documented before. I’ve not researched that further though, as I’ve given up on that ‘dream’ myself, and have gone with standard format sticks. Most pre-manufactured joysticks these days are USB connections, and so will work on your console of choice – the gamer’s XBox 360 or the one-handed blu-ray fondler’s PS3 system – as well as on your PC. And the PC functionality is really not to be scoffed at. As I’ve discovered recently purchased a new PC that can actually run GGPO, whilst the PC fighting game scene is not nearly as well subscribed as it is for consoles, there is actually a huge amount of choice and options out there to play. If you’re a fighting game player with a decent PC I seriously recommend giving GGPO a try if you haven’t already. Then of course there’s games like Street Fighter IV, and other Japanese titles. Although a lot of Japanese titles will need Japanese OS support to run unfortunately. Trawling shoryuken forums would be the first place to look if you want to know more about this. The PC compatibility and USB-ness also gives you huge potential for future-proofing your stick use as well, although of course it cannot be guaranteed, as who knows what new consoles or new PC solutions will come along.

So if you’re willing to spend the cash on a really good joystick with manufactured-for-the-arcade parts, the ones I’d go for are either the Madcatz Tournament Edition stick (the ‘TE stick”) or the Hori Real Arcade Pro (the “HRAP”). I’ve played on the 360 versions of both and I rate them both the same really. The TE stick is slightly bigger, but the HRAP is actually a lot heavier due to it’s metal base. I honestly couldn’t choose between them, and while I currently own a TE stick, I’ll quite likely invest in an HRAP as my next potential stick. It really just comes down to looks & a personal feel (ooo-er). The TE stick does have some snazzy extra features like turbo commands etc, but those are only for online cheaters anyway, and so should not interest you at all. One advantage of the TE stick being far more widespread is that it’s almost the de-facto tournament standard in the UK. So, like I did, you can potentially go to a tournament run on a console you don’t own a joystick for, borrow a sticks off a different kind person each round, and still get a stick you are familiar with to play on the whole time.

I had better state though, whilst I can vouch for the PS3 version of the TE stick as much as the 360 one, I can’t do the same for the PS3 version of the HRAP, as it is actually a slightly different model. The 360 version is called the Hori Real Arcade Pro EX, whereas the PS3 is known as the Hori Real Arcade Pro 3. Their design is actually visually quite different, although they may well be the same parts.

If you’re buying these sticks from the UK, here’s some current links for them on amazon:

Sexy HRAP EX for 360.

Pug-ugly HRAP3 for PS3.

TE stick for 360.

TE Stick for PS3.

Remember, all of these will work fine on a decent PC too.

If you want to go for a cheaper stick then it’s a whole different ball game though. These will always be smaller and much lighter than the pricier sticks discussed above. For many players, that’s a deal-breaker immediately. Also bear in mind cheaper sticks will use replica parts rather than true ‘arcade parts’. This doesn’t mean they are that much worse – such sticks can be perfectly functional (David Sirlin himself defended the Hori EX2 and indeed used it to get the #1 ranking on SF2HDR for a time), it’s just that they won’t feel as good, the stick and buttons will feel slightly less responsive if you are really used to playing with the best kind of parts, and also, they are far more likely to break due to wear & usage.

I would personally recommend the Hori EX2 for the XBox 360. I just sold my old Hori EX2 to agoners’ own Navan Daughn actually, as that was exactly what he wanted to get himself started. The PS3 version of this stick is again slightly different; the Hori Arcade Fighting Stick (HAFS??) which in limited use I’m afraid I didn’t like at all; it may have simply been an overworn old stick, but in my limited use it seemed a lot worse than the EX2 for the 360, hence my concern with HRAP for PS3 too (but it could potentially be better for all I know!). Similarly I have had bad experiences with the Madcatz Standard Edition (the “SE stick”), so I cannot personally recommend it even as a budget stick.

If you’re actually into modding a stick, then I’m afraid I cannot offer much advice other than to explain a few of the basics. The main difference between different arcade parts is Japanese style arcade parts, or American style arcade parts. Both are just as good it really just depends on your preference, which is why if you have limited real-life arcade experience I wouldn’t start modding your stick immediately without trying some out.

For buttons, Japanese style means convex (bumping out, the centre of button is the highest point), and USA style is concave (dimpled inwards, so their edges are highest). USA buttons are also traditionally laid out in a straight line, whereas the Japanese button layout is slightly curved with the lengths of your fingers.

For the stick itself Japanese means a ball-top, whereas American means a bat-top. You can also get specific 8-way gates and 4-way gates. True 4-way gates are sticks that will only go into the up/down/left/right positions and so are actually generally specialised ones for retro games like Pac Man or certain shumps, not really for fighting games, assuming you actually want to be able to jump forward or crouch block. But you can also get specifically shaped gates underneath the stick too. Japanese style gates are generally square, meaning the ‘four corners’ can easily be felt if you slide the stick around. eg. you can feel down/back and down/forward, whereas the straight back and straight forward are slightly harder to find. An octagonal gate means that there is slightly stronger impression for all 8 directions, but it may feel relatively harder to find the corners. Some USA parts also offer ‘optical 360′ sticks which have a true round gate and use optical readings of the stick position to determine which angle it is closest too rather than microswitches.

There are different manufacturers of both Japanese and American parts for both the sticks and the buttons. I am not knowledgeable enough to discuss their various merits or difference, but I can tell you the most popular ones I have seen referenced are Sanwa and Seimitsu for Japanese style parts, and HAPP for USA style parts.

You’ll notice that all of the pre-manufactured joysticks mentioned above are all Japanese style in terms of stick, buttons and layout (and also gate shape on all I’ve tried). For this reason, the main reason to mod these days, is if you have a preference for a specific manufacturers parts, or want even a partially USA style stick at all.

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.

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.

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

Defection to the Enemy Camp – Console vs PC (again)

Sore Thumbs

I knew this was a bad idea to start a blog with Remy. Due to his persistent and insidious prodding I went out and bought myself a large hi-def screen and an <shame>xbox360</shame>
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In my defense the screen is still technically a computer monitor (a highly recommended Dell UltraSharp 2707WFP 27)

So throwing off the chains of prejudice that I have been swinging around my head, usual aimed at console gaming and consoler gamers (aka: baboons), I booted up the machine (nb. to justify my purchase I’m going to use as much PC terminology as possible when talking about my Xbox). Mucho to my disgust I was already enjoying the experience. A few seconds later it was on, no passwords to put in or bios screens to negotiate. Even connecting it to my home network was a doddle. And I was so looking forward to failing at it so I would have a chance to gripe about it! Damn!

So sticking in my new purchase of Ninja Gaiden 2 it started up within a few seconds and the graphics are gorgeous! So as a PC user my first port of call is the options menu to start optimising the sound, graphics and controls to get it running as crash free and efficiently as possible. And what do I find!? Nothing! NO options, NO graphics sliders, NO control configurations…how do they play the game then?!?

Then suddenly it all made sense. This is why people use consoles. It’s gaming with no faff. It was such a liberating feeling. I dove straight into the game and loved the smooth controls, the lovely graphics and amazing animation (as in the first Ninja Gaiden game I played on the XBOX). It was already obvious that a lot more effort and detail has gone into this than any PC game in recent history. This elation with my new gaming experience came crashing down around my ears a few hours into it. First the graphical tearing, then the frame rate dropping and finally a complete system failure. I wasn’t sure if I should be happy or disappointed; happy that the console gaming experience wasn’t a flawless nirvana or disappointed for the exact same reason. At least resetting the game didn’t take too long.

My next experience was to try out Halolz 3. Again, beautifully cinematic. But the moment the gameplay began I forgave my clunky and expensive PC all its past sins. The FPS experience on a console controller is unbearable after playing at high levels with the mouse/keyboard. It’s slow, sluggish and awkward with no finesse (like a bicycling hippo). The fact that it requires assisted aiming means that it is the wrong way of doing it. With a different control input it would be fine, but with the standard game-pads it doesn’t work. I can now understand why Remy has never had a chance to get on with this genre of game.

So to conclude this extremely abridged comparison between console and PC gaming: they are both great and flawed gaming platforms. Some games work better on the PC and some on the Xbox.

However, this is a pointless argument as the best gaming platform has already come and gone. None are as awesome as:

Bow before my awesomeness!

Review of the Orange Box (for remy77077)

Since remy77077 was procrastinating about whether or not to buy the Orange Box I’ve decided to give a review of the whole zesty package. To do this properly I’d really have to review this compilation of 3 games (Half-life and episodes being counted as one) separately. So here’s my crash-course review.

Half Life 2
Starting with the least compelling game in the box, Half-life 2 (including episodes): Calling this the least compelling goes to show what is in store in this little box of joy. As a ground breaking first person shooting (FPS), back in the mists of time when Half-life 1 first came out (circa 1542BC), it was a dream come true. As an FPS it was fairly standard with pretty graphics, but the story line was emersive and gripping.

HL2 follows on from this with more of the same. Which therefore means not-groundbreaking although the storyline is pretty good. But the physics are ace to play with. The most entertaining thing to come out of it would be this: Concerned: The Half-life and Death of Gordon Frohman . Since I’m a PC Fanboy I’m not sure how it ports to console but I imagine some of what makes HL2 special gets a bit lost as the ease of manipulating the environs would be a pain with a controller.

If it was more free-roaming rather than how strictly on-rails it is, would have made this a much better game. I frequently got bored of running from one encounter to another and would amuse myself with trying to copy the Concerned comic and seeing how far I could fling Mr Freeman with a pile of exploding barrels and a bathtub.

Fun Factor – Medium
Opportunity to kill Freeman in ever increasingly ingenius ways – Very High
Replayability – None

 

Team Fortress 2
The 2nd Box Item in the list is the long awaited (although isn’t everything from Valve?) Team Fortress 2. A crazy, whizzbanger of an online shooter that is very entertaining but which should be funnier than it actually is. Bad thing first: it suffers from the Halolz factor. I.e. it’s full of prepubescent dimwits who only now how to cast aspersions on your sexuality in a stream of creative spelling errors. Bearing this in mind it does give a great sense of superiority when you play and bring a smattering of intelligence to the fight. Such as when playing as an engineer and using well placed gun turrets and spending your time kepping them maintained. Or actually healing people as a medic instead of trying to take on the entirety of the enemy team in a misguided attempt of proving Darwins theory by spectacularly removing the stupid genes from our gene pool by smearing your own genes all over the level.

Fun Factor – High
Sense of Superiority – Very High
Chance of Surviving More than 45 Seconds – Very Low

Portal
The most innovative FPS game with the exception of Wolfenstein 3D. More of a puzzle as there is isn’t actually any shooting to be had. So I am now going to coin the phrase: First Person Puzzler (at least the first person to claim coining the term anyway…Well, first person this year to do so).

See this video for what the game entails:

After the first fiew brain twisting levels you’ll find that as the migrain clears your use of portals becomes second nature.

My only criticism is that it’s far too short a game. I completed the standard levels in a couple of hours. It becomes more interesting when it came to the advanced levels and challenges. Trying to complete levels using the minimum number of portals I found particularly fun. I’m still trying to untwist my brain and control the insanely strong desire to own a portal gun because of all the cool stuff you could do with it.

Brain Twistiness – High
Fun Factor – Very High
Variety of Weapons – 1
Cake References – Mucho
Pie References – Not Enough (is there ever?)

remy77077: There’s just one problem with all of this for me, but it’s a significant one… I clearly am coming from a very different perspective on this to Nathan – or almost any reviewer of any FPS these days. I played the original HL more or less when it first game out, and it was far from any dream come true – I utterly loathed it! The moment I am dropped into an FPS environment, I have such a strong natural dislike for it, despite playing many many games and trying my best to get into it for years, that everything immediately feels ‘wrong’. The game needs to do something awesome to even jar me to a state of neutrality… HL never did this for me for a moment. The other trouble with the storyline is that I played the demo of HL2 on the 360, and you were just dropped completely in the middle of it, and I had absolutely no clue whatsoever what was going on in the story- and as such had no care or association with it whatsoever. Now whether that demo is a fair representation of the game or not I don’t know, but it has given me huge cause for doubt regarding story issues. It can take quite a lot to even get me to care about the storyline in a game anyway.

Regarding Portal: Are you sure about it becoming second nature? I watched this video and it’s done more to put me off Portal than anything else before it. It looks incredibly annoying and frustrating to me. I mean, I love the idea – but being forced to do this through the horrific interface and perspective of an FPS game looks like it will drive me insane. Heh.. I suppose this all ups the intrigue count though.

lordnaff: I won’t mention FPS again in the presence of Rik as the bile created is in danger of flooding Agoners HQ. Well the FPS platform is PC…not for stump-fingered Console-Utilising-Non-Technical-Simians