The Ironic Review Review

Castle Crashers; it's a fun party game. But is that worth 5 stars?

With the new summer dashboard update for the XBox 360, it’s interesting to note they’ve finally added one of the features I’d suggested a while ago – some kind of game review ratings system on XBox Live. Whilst the feature is still far from the way I would’ve implemented it, it’s a nice start. There is an obvious immediate flaw, as many have pointed out, that you can “Rate” any content without even buying it or even downloading a demo. I also noticed you could ‘Rate’ non-downloadable games that were in your disk drive; but there doesn’t seem to be any way for anyone else to see those ratings yet.

I actually don’t see the ‘rate it without playing it’ as an especially a huge issue really, far bigger problems are the natural bias of these type of user reviews, and the fact you can only see the median average score. Many people get very attached to games they enjoy & the classic ‘fanboy review’ problem is an obvious one – or even ‘hater reviews’ too. It’s why I’d much rather see the ratings of a trusted friend, or group of friends, than these “aggregated figures”. People are far more inclined to both to even leave a review for a game they really love or really hate, and I’ve noticed the vast majority of games I looked at so far had an average score of over 4 stars, and the worst rated games I saw were still over 3!

Absolutely top-tier at everything

However when I came to try to ‘review’ a few games myself, it made me consider that it really is a difficult task to apply fairly & come out with a simplistic score. What really matters when it comes to a game? Does quality count more than quantity? How do you really classify quantity? How do you ‘finish’ a game anyway? When you’ve finished all the levels, when you’ve got all the Achievements? When you’re ranked#1 in the world? Do you take the price of a title into account… but again, prices change over time with discounts and 2nd-hand games etc. What about the community and online features surrounding a game? This is something that is starting to matter almost more than the game itself for me at times. For example King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match. If I was reviewing that as an offline title, I’d be leaning towards a 4 or a 5 star rating as I find it a lot of fun, although I’m not sure about the character balance at this point. However these days, it’s poor netcode renders it a pale shadow of an online fighting game compared to a game with good netcode and a good lobby system like SSF2T HD Remix. But should KOF98UM get marked down for that? For me, the netcode matters a vast amount, but if I had a huge group of skilled offline players available to play with it wouldn’t nearly so much. How can a review reflect your own community situation which may differ from others? There’s also the main fact that most reviewers, especially professional reviewers review games far too quickly for my liking. Until I really know all the ins & outs & true depths of the game, I can’t honestly say. For many games this takes years of play, not only by yourself, but by a larger community. But how many games do I even have time to play to this degree? Only a small handful. For example, for the first year or so of it’s release, I absolutely loved Street Fighter 3 3rd Strike. However today, when it’s character balance has proven to be very lacking, it’s a game I don’t rate so highly for my own tastes. So I tend to look at things on a very long term view. A true classic game ought to stand the test of time & still be great even today (and provided you overlook character balance, SF3 3s still passes that test anyway!). What about ongoing support? When Starcraft or Team Fortress 2 receives a patch that improves the game, doesn’t that require a re-review?

In the end I feel almost all games reviews are pretty lacking, and very few are even transparent about the criteria they use for a review score. I think they work ok for the big generic ‘play through this once’ type of games that fill the ‘mainstream’ (at least for gamer hobbyists), & as a general comparison between similar titles, and to see what’s “got hype”. But for games where you want to take your play to another level, especially competitive multiplayer titles which form the staple of many agoners’ gaming diets, all you can really get even from even a ‘good’ review is limited factual information about display rates and netcode etc. For example I’ve cancelled my pre-order of KOF12, with great disappointment, based on reviews universally complaining about it’s netcode, but I’ve ignored most of the taste-based comments about its gameplay engine, as for me, there’s really no review I can trust out there online. I’d have to go to a specialist website like shoryuken and trawl the forums to find players who seem to be my type of player to listen to, but much more likely I’ll simply have to play it enough for myself to really find out. Because outside of anyone who’s played this a huge amount in Far Eastern arcades; no-one really knows yet. The basic problem with reviewing a game is that it’s interactive entertainment. Whilst the ‘observer’ is a huge piece of the puzzle when any kind of entertainment or art is reviewed, with games, the player’s own conceptions, knowledge, emotions & attitude are all magnified that much more due to their actual interaction with the piece.

With all this said, I did review one game. Adding to the fanboy review problem myself, I gave SSF2T HD Remix a glowing 5 stars. I did this simply because based on any criteria imaginable, this is probably as close to a perfect game as I’ve ever seen. So I feel it’s a ’safe’ one to review. Almost every other game I find myself leaning towards a score rating yet wanting to write a “but…” caveat.

Overall, I’d give the XBox Live game reviewing system my highest ever review score: one turd.

How ironic.

To the spirit of a fighter

Stolen from somewhere on SRK.com! I actually needed a bit of help translating the advice dog - 'FOB' = "fresh off the boat" - a reference to displaying "contemporary East Asian youth cultures" in this instance Oh and 'AH' is Arcana Hearts.

There’s an article forthcoming on my full thoughts on Street Fighter IV, but I think it’s a summary enough to say for now that I’m no longer playing or following the game very much at all. However as long pre-supposed here on agoners, the main reason for the excitement around SF4 was not SF4 itself, but its position as a flagbearer for the return of the 2d fighting game scene in general. And what a return it has been!

The years of having nothing fighting game wise to play, and/or no-one to play against have ended, and now the pendulum has swung the other way with veritable a glut of good fighting games, and XBox Live and other competition generally always available. And not to mention the excellent joysticks and controllers now available, neatly solving all my joystick issues, are also mainly thanks to SF4.

The trouble now is finding the time to play them all, and deciding which to play and which to dedicate my real ’serious’ gaming time to as well. Perhaps the advice dog can help?

This past few weeks have been especially mad with both Garou: Mark of the Wolves & The King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match being released to XBox Live Arcade.

I’d never had the chance to play Garou at all before, but it seems to be a really great engine and really fun to play so far. It appears to be pretty much the ‘Street Fighter 3′ of the Fatal Fury series, set after the other games, with only a single returning (much older) character, with vastly improved graphics & animation and even technical additions to the game engine centering around just-defense, a kind of parry. I’m intrigued to actually find out more about where some of these characters come from too, although many are of pretty obvious parentage/heritage. This game on it’s own just a couple of years ago would’ve had me immensely excited & playing it night after night. Now it’s practically lost in the sea of fighting games.

Too many great characters & games!

The King of Fighters 98 Ulitimate Match, as well as being an appropriately long-winded title, actually lives up to it’s billing. Another game I’d never got to play, I was really shocked at how amazing it is. I really lost touch with KOF beyond 97 & one of the contributing factors was constantly having my favourite characters removed or having their moves changed beyond all recognition. But KOF98UM is a glorious return to form for me!

OHMSHIT!!GEYSER!

Virtually every one of my favourite characters or moves are back & in the form I used and loved them – it’s almost like meeting old friends again.

The only huge let-down with both SNK games is that the netcode & Live interface is almost tragically poor. The input lag is worse than even SF4, and at times even worse than older XBox titles like 3rd Strike. This is such a terrible shame really, as it will really put a shelf-life on both of these titles as it will hamper any attempts at “serious play” for me, because I don’t have any similarly passionate local competition. The one saving grace for them is that, like SF4, it is possible to cancel out of fighting high-ping opponents altogether. But the odd awful game still seems to occur.

Still, it’s such a pity that something much better wasn’t done with these great games that would’ve had so much potential online. It still absolutely astounds me that no fighting game has ever managed to “get it all right” in terms of its online interface, given how many years systems like XBox Live & GGPO have been around.

The next couple of months will also bring us Marvel Vs Capcom 2 to Live Arcade, and hopefully a PAL release of King of Fighters 12, both of which will hopefully involve further attempts by the same companies to better their online fighting experiences, so there is some hope at least. Oh and I’m certainly not forgetting SSF2T HD Remix! Taken as a whole package, including the netcode, HD Remix is still the best fighting game around, and one I cannot ever foresee leaving behind.

There are also yet more games that are leaving a bitter taste of absence for me though. Both Virtual On Oratorio Tangram and BlazBlue are games I’d love to be playing and would be hugely excited about. However VOOT is awaiting a decent twin stick controller to be available to me – in the UK – before it actually becomes worth playing! But at least Hori are planning to manufacture one in Japan, so I have some hopes I’ll be able to pick up one and get a chance to play this game online (although it apparently suffers from the same netcode failings as the SNK games.. *sigh*). BlazBlue is incredibly frustrating for me, thanks to my old enemies: Region lock-out disks, and No PAL release whatsoever. Now this situation has occured before – for one of my potential favourite XBox 360 games, All-Pro Football 2k8, which was why I’d originally purchased an NTSC American 360 Elite… however when it RROD’d on me, I was left with a fixed PAL UK model instead, so I’m now unable to play 2k8. The same has happened with a few other games, notably Japan-only ones though (like Super Robot Wars XO), and now its the case with BlazBlue too. This is always a pretty irritating state of affairs, but it causes RAGE GAUGE levels of annoyance when you can actually ’see’ your friends on your XBox Live friends list playing it!

It just brings home how utterly retarded and ass-backwards region lock-outs for non-global release games are – they are literally just refusing to take my money, pointlessly. As long as it gets released at some point though, I won’t be too upset, as I do have plenty enough other games to be playing. So in some ways this is a good time for it not to be released. But the problem is that when it does eventually come out in the UK, I’ll be hopelessly behind the learning curve compared to the top players (not that it’s at all certain I’d ever be competitive at it anyway!), and I’ll be really upset if we don’t get an equivalent collectors edition set as the USA and Asia got, because the idea of  a tutorial DVD included with the game is one of the things that particularly drew me into potentially getting into this game much more seriously than I otherwise would. I’m also irritated by the total lack of information on this, because I’d be quite tempted to try and get ahold of another NTSC 360 if this game isn’t going to receive a PAL release sometime soon.

Anyway, I don’t want to grumble too much, because the main point of this post was just to say ”yay, I was right!” when it comes to the rejuvenation of the 2d fighting game scene – there’s never been so many great reasons NOT to play SF4!

Ultimate Achievement Unlocked: MACROSS Gamerscore

I WIN!!!11! olol

Far more fun than racking up a huge pointless gamerscore…

This historic moment deserves to be captured for posterity:

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

MA
KU
RO
SU

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

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

Another Team Shitty X Classic

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4TW!!!11one

First off, let me say I love achievements. The reason why I’ve moved from being a rabid PC gamer to a sell-out console gamer has a lot to do with the lusty lure of achievements. They change the way we perceive games, they give a lasting physical presence to the time that we’ve wiled away mashing those 4 colourful buttons on the controller.

However, in game design terms, they have to be vary carefully written. A single achievement can add hours of extra gameplay or completely break a game. Remy has already gone into this and I don’t have much to add, so go read his post for more opinion of this fact.

I just wanted to make a comment about those scummy, loathsome individuals who have taken the achievements as being the be-all and end-all of their gaming experience, and thus fucking it up for the rest of us (at least for online play). Those people who are gaming online and dropping out of matches, or refusing to play with people who won’t help them with their achievement hunt. This has effectively made me realise that these people should be contained and allowed to only interract with each other so that the rest of us can be rid of them. Here’s my proposal how:

Design a new controller for gamers with this mindset. I call it the iWin controller:

iWin controller(TM)

 

 

These people can now play online only against other owners of the iWin. It works in any game and the game mechanic is this: the first person to press the patented iWin button, wins. Achievements can be unlocked such as 6,000,000 points for winning. But only other owners of the iWin can see the achievements of other iWin owners. The ergonomic design also comes with a keyboard to allow people to boast about their ability with shouts of “I win!!1! lol!!!11″

Effectively we will quarantine all these gamers into a neat virtual sub-world of petty assholeness that is essentially invisible to the rest of us who want to enjoy our gaming time online.

All controllers will have a small thermonuclear device hidden inside that will detonate once sales of the device stop, thus adding chlorine to the gene-pool.

 

A typical iWin loser

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to Achieve

Well, the release date is now known and even the Achievements for Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix have been leaked which makes this an ideal time for me to discuss some more of my thoughts on XBox Achievements. When I first got my 360, my first reaction was “what is the point in this?”. But the more I’ve played with them though, I have come around to liking them; but only when they are actually fun. I like having the record of games I’ve played and where I’ve got to on them, and some of them also introduce interesting new twists and challenges on the basic gameplay. I don’t suffer from feeling the need to get all of them on any game for me to ‘complete it’ like some people do, but I do enjoy the added incentive to try and complete a game on ‘Hard’ mode for example. I have even noticed an odd converse effect for me; games I don’t like much I find that having Achievements actively encourages me not to try and get them – as I don’t want anyone mistaking a high gamerscore for me having a great liking for the game (Yes Soul Calibur 4 I’m looking at you ).

I also like how certain well-written Achievements encourage people to play the game in more interesting ways – a very basic example being an Achievement for getting ranked wins online in a competitive game is great for encouraging more players to take up the gauntlet of online play, meaning more games available for everyone online – as long as the game’s ranked matchmaking supports it properly anyway. If you’re new to Achievements and would like to understand more about them or the good effect of them, here’s a really great write-up I found while researching for this post on a blog called ‘Not Rocket Science’.

I can also understand the appeal of the ‘metagame’ around Achievements, even though the way some people seem to view it as some kind of score run is really pointless, as the best way to get a high gamerscore is simply to buy lots of games and spend lots of time playing them. The idea that your total Achievement score is much more than a ‘time & money spent gaming’ indicator (a gaming experience counter if you like) is really rather silly to me. Only rarely do Achievements show any real measure of skill; because most of the time there are shortcuts and ways around them anyway if you choose to use them – and it appears that I am a relatively rare case in refusing to take such shortcuts. Also known as “boosting”, to use the lingo. For example on Street Fighter 2 Hyper Fighting, most people get the ‘beat the game without losing a match or a round’ Achievements by putting the game down to the lowest difficulty. For me, I only want to try and get the Achievement on default settings, without cheating, arranging things on purpose with friends etc. Basically, I’m not interested in any of the stuff that generally consitutes ‘boosting’, as it’s simply not my idea of fun. I don’t even like the idea of using guides to help me find all the collectible-style Achievements (Halol 3 skulls, CoOG tags, Castle Crasher’s animals etc), but this is a general problem of the information age of the internet than games themselves. It’s pretty impossible to hide a secret or make a puzzle in a game when within minutes anyone can find the answers online. It’s especially an issue when the main gameplay itself revolves around puzzle or searching concepts. (Incidently this is why I was so impressed with the official Braid walkthrough).

Like all right-thinking people, Agoners hate cheats like the New England Cheatriots

The trouble is though that the Achievements themselves can actually encourage people into doing stupid things, such as cheating, boosting, or just reading a guide rather than enjoying the challenge to do it themselves; as they value the gamerscore metagame more than the actual game itself. Because this kind of attitude clearly exists, to different levels of extremity of course, developers really ought to consider how players behaviour can change completely based on how they write their Achievements into a game. A terrible example, and probably the worst Achievement I’ve ever seen is in Speedball II (currently my 2nd best game in terms of ‘Overachievement’ versus the average player according to mygamercard.net), which has an Achievement for beating an opponent online by at least 100 points. I am certain that 99% of people who actually have that Achievement did it by ‘boosting’ with a friend, so it’s a complete waste of time to even have it. But what’s even worse about this one is that I wouldn’t even want to try and get it legitimately. If I was actually playing someone who I was so much better than that I really could beat them by 100 points, I wouldn’t want to try and do it! There are few enough players on this game as it is, I certainly wouldn’t want to grind a prospective future opponent into the dust just for the sake of the Achievement points. I’ve also heard many stories of multiplayer games such as Halo 3 matches being marred by ridiculous player behaviour because of people “boosting” for the achievements and not actually playing the game. However I think a lot of the blame lies with the game developers and their poorly written Achievements than just the players themselves.

That said though, the attitude of some players really does beggar belief. Going back to HD Remix that I began the post with; the ‘leaked’ Achievements for this game caused a bit of a stir, even amongst hardcore Street Fighter fans, especially the “Master of all” Achievement which requires you to “Win a Ranked Match with every character (30 G)”. Many players are unhappy about the fact they will potentially mess up their online win/loss record, and overall ranking score, by playing with their weaker characters if they wanted to get this Achievement. But the prevailing attitude amongst actual fans of the game was simply “I won’t bother with it then” – which is exactly the response I’d expect, as these players actually care more about enjoying the game and trying to win than they do about some essentially meaningless Achievement total.

Myself, I would like to try and get all the Achievements on this game, just to show my love for it as much as anything else! I also wonder if Capcom put it there on purpose to encourage more variety of play in online ranked matches. I personally really do like the encouragement to play more different characters being in the game somewhere, and Achievements is an excellent place for it, but I think I’d prefer it as an offline Achievement than a ranked-match one. But HDR is a perfect opportunity for me anyway, since the re-balances appeal to me so much I have already played more new characters reasonably seriously on test versions of the game (Ryu, T Hawk) than I’ve ever played at any version of SF2.

But let’s look at how other people viewed the HDR Achievements leak. These are all genuine unedited quotes:

• “based on previous street fighter games, for the perfect you just set it to easy, select E-Honda, and mash the punch button. DONE. 5 perfects.”
• “Hopefully the online ones are nice and boostable. My best friend is getting it so we’ll take turns winning online and have those in a day or so.”
• “I’m a bit surprised that there is no “Win and online tournament” achievement and a bit annoyed that I have to count on enough people buying the game to make the 100 wins a possibility.”

I was almost speechless at the stupidity of these people, but I do have to thank them for inspiring this blog post I suppose. I believe lordnaff will be along soon with an appropriate agoners take on these kinds of people too.

Back to Speedball II for a final thought of how ingrained this is, on the “FAQ and achievement guide” on Xbox.com’s own forums, it actually breaks the game’s, admittedly extremely poorly conceived Achievements, into sections for “do these online with a friend” and “do these with a second controller”, and gives a variety of hints on how to cheat in various ways (quitting games when you are about to lose etc). Their are also a bunch of posts on the forum with people “looking for online achievement buddy”. It all speaks for itself really.

Date Pls Crapcom!??

I seriously want the release date soon as I want to book the days off work… If I get the date too late it increases the chances I won’t be able to. Rah!

Mind you, it’s not like I don’t have enough to keep me occupied at least. The ‘NXE’ is out tomorrow, and I’ve been playing more on The Orange Box, Gears of War 1 & 2, Lost Odyssey, Castle Crashers.. and more. I’ve also got a list of interesting PC stuff I’ve not had time to even look at. It’s a really good time for games!

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

XBox Live Love Be Believe

I’m a huge fan of XBox Live. I’ve already dipped into this when I described it as the “new arcade” in an earlier post. When I see comments in reviews like “it’s got leaderboards if you really want to see you have a better score than MasterKillPwnz666″, I just feel these people totally miss the point. I guess that a reasonable portion of my makeup is a Participant or social gamer, but of course it’s the unbeatable agon of real human competition that is the real crux for me.

Although I have little first-hand experience of them I’ve heard that other systems like PSN and Steam and others like it on the PC are gaining ground on it, so I’m keenly awaiting the new XBox Live “Experience” to see how this enhances XBox Live it on November 19th. Since Live is rather notably the exception in that it is not free – they really do need to add features if they aren’t willing to cut the cost. I’m really happy to pay for what, so far, is a superior service though.

However nice the new avatars and friend-group functionality is though, I suspect they won’t cover all the things I’ve personally being seeing the potential for, honestly, for years now. So here’s a run down of some of them. I’ll be interested to come back to this post and see if Microsoft actually ‘hits’ on any of these.

1. “Now fight a new rival”

What is the the most frustrating screen in any Live-enabled game? “Your opponent cannot be found” following the pathetic early quit of one of life’s losers?… close. But actually I’d give it to the “Waiting for Opponent” screen. I’d hate to add up the time I’ve ‘wasted’ sat there waiting for a challenger at any number of games since the advent of XBox Live. I used to attempt to allieviate this by reading a magazine or a paper at the time, and it has become a lot less frequent a problem now the community on the 360 is simply so large & games have become better designed to cause more frequent re-matches, but this can also make it seem even more irritating when it is unexpected and you’re not so prepared to deal with it. It would at least be better if games showed you how many players were online at that time in the game, to give you some idea if your wait is truely fruitless. Oddly the one game that manages this in a really excellent fashion, Halo 3, is arguably the game that least needs this feature. When I’m sat waiting and wondering if I am totally alone in the world in wanting a game of Speedball 2 or Joust, it would be nice to know if I really am alone!

However, there’s something even better that could be done. I don’t remember sitting at an arcade cabinet listening to the remixed Street Fighter Anniversary Edition menu music for an hour… because of course I was playing against the CPU instead of being sat there looking at a blue screen. I really don’t know why games don’t incorporate this feature – allowing you to play the game in 1 player mode whilst being available for a multiplayer match. I presume it would often add an unnecessary pause when a match is found and the game would need to load more; but regardless, it would be a worthwhile trade off. On so many games this simple feature would be a godsend.

But one problem is that many games that need this the most are the older and more obscure titles. Expecting the game’s producers to patch this kind of add on onto old games is obviously a forlorn hope, but a retroactive ‘fix’ could be done, if it was Live-wide. eg: As part of the Guide button overlay, have some kind of simple game, or games, that can be played over the top of any other game whilst you are ‘waiting’ and effectively in pause online. This would be a huge upgrade for me that would revitalise a number of older titles, especially if available in XBox 1 emulation mode.

At the very least I hope to see some new fighting game come out that uses this idea to some extent.. yes Street Fighter 4 – I am looking at you!

2. Metacritical

It’s really nice to be able to see what my friends are playing online. As some companies have noted, this is even a huge free advertising stream for them. I see a lot of my friends playing COD4, it makes me interested in COD4, at least until I remember it’s another flippin’ FPS anyway

But I also like, and use, the ability to send a “recommendation” to a friend for an XBox Live Arcade game. But this could be taken much, much further. For example a review feature where you could rate games you’ve played. You could then search for data on the most popular games from the entirety of XBox Live, or what your friend’s recommend. A simple 5 star review system would be simple and could work well. I’d be really interested to see what the highest rated game would be from my friend’s list for example. Time to get some new friends if you find your friends list rates Halolz higher than Braid perhaps?

Time-played data for games amongst my friends would also be something I’d find useful – although I guess this would need to be opt-in only or it could get rather intrusive.

You could even combine these ideas, and combine it with Achievements, and allow people to re-review games at a later point. Do people with huge time-played and Achievement scores tend to rate the game higher?.. you’d expect so but it may not always be the case. You could potentially filter out to only see review scores from players that had a certain amount of Achievements on a game – to see what players that really play that kind of game think of it for example.

It would also be great to have an easier method to see which games your friends actually play. The only way you can do this really right now, other than trawling through all your friend’s gamercards, or just taking a mental note when you see them online, is with an XBLA game that has an effective “View friends leaderboard”. For example last night I found out that a couple of my newer XBL friends actually play & own Joust! Something I will hopefully remember next time I see them online and I can potentially offer them an invite to a co-op game.

It really intrigued me when it was said MS may use metacritic scores and download rates as their guide for ‘purging’ old Arcade games from their burgeoning download list – when you think how much more data they could easily have available for this kind of thing.

3. “Remy77077 is . “

Ok, I’ve got my XBL ‘motto’. I’ve gone from “Complex Competition” to “Team Shiity Shotty” recently… but will anyone actually notice this update? Some kind of facebook-like comments and updates would really add to the Live experience for me. Maybe I’m just too much of a socialite and other people wouldn’t like this, but again, with the right privacy and opt-in options, I don’t see how it could do any harm. I’d also love the ability to tag comments against people on my own friends list. Something like “Lives in London, met playing HD Remix beta test” or something would be great to help you manage a large friend’s list – as many people’s profiles are annoyingly sparse. I often find myself using the “Compare Games” feature just to figure out how I even know someone.

4. “It is a gift”

I was wanting to give some MS Points to a friend for a birthday recently and I was bemused that the only way I could do it was to hand him an actual real-life MS Points card. Surely there should be a simple digital way to manage this? Why not allow me to spend my MS Points to send a full game to a friend at least?

5. PeeCee

I’ve noted a few more games these days using the “Live For Windows” moniker and I wonder why there is so little intregration between the systems. I really like the ability to use certain features of Live through XBox.com, but I’d really love it if I could link my PC games more readily into one system. Obviously with a platform as open as the PC, versus the closed system of 360 this is never going to fully intregrate – but I am still shocked at how little has been done so far. Perhaps MS has it’s reasons for keeping it that way, but as noted, it seems to be making baby-steps in this direction.

I don’t think any of this is rocket science…

One team has STICK!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fight For Futility!