PC Game Fun Time

After months of inactivity, the official Team Fortress 2 site has finally been updated with some of the new ideas that are in the pipeline.  Veteran players will be happy to learn that Valve has put some of their people back on the task of upgrading the TF2 experience.

Very soon we should be seeing a few interesting changes to the Engineering class, namely the ability to upgrade both dispensers and teleporters.  Higher level teleporters will cool down more quickly, and higher level dispensers will give out more ammo and health.  The teleporter change in particular could substantially change the balance on some maps where getting troops to the front line is important for the attacking team.  The dispenser change sounds like it will be less notable, but then again it may prove critical for Heavies trying to defend a key point without the assistance of a Medic.

Probably most interesting, however, is that Valve has indicated that the next class pack will be for the Scout.  I for one am very excited to see what unlockables the Scout will gain, and whether we will see some new uses for the class.

I have been a little lax and haven’t really put in much time with TF2 lately.  If Valve can get their act together and starting pushing out some more regular updates, maybe that situation will change.

Another week, another heinous DRM debacle. This time the travesty is with the recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC, a game that I was really looking forward to because I enjoyed all three of its predecessors on the PlayStation 2, but do not own a “current gen” console system on which to play it. Unfortunately, it looks like the PC release has been completely botched by poor quality control and Digital Restrictions Management issues, to the point that I’m not even considering wasting my money on it.

Let’s do a quick comparison between the console experience and the PC experience for Grand Theft Auto IV, shall we?

• Console
  • Put the game disk into your console and it works.
• Computer
  • Put the game disk into your computer.
  • Go through multiple stages of authorization, including DVD validation, entering a serial key, and entering a code from the manual.
  • SecuROM gets installed (naturally).
  • Mandatory sign-up for both Rockstar Social Club and Windows Live, both of which require email validation.
  • Download the decently sized Windows Live update.
  • The game menu takes forever and a half to display, because the menu is downloaded dynamically from a heavily overloaded server on the Internet each time you launch the game.
  • The game is buggy as hell, with lots of crashes to the desktop, and performs poorly even on high-end hardware.

The game cannot be played without Internet access, even if you are just trying to play the single-player mode. So much for gaming on the go. And if you’re running Windows Vista 64-bit, which you should be because the limit of 4 GB RAM with the 32-bit version is turning into a huge liability, you’re hosed, because the game flat-out does not support 64-bit operating systems.

I have a simple message to the craven idiots responsible for the release of Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC: This is why gamers migrate to consoles, you fools! Instead of wasting your development time on DRM and activation features, you should have spent it on 64-bit compatibility, stability fixes, and performance boosts. In an age when most higher-end PC graphics cards have two GPUs on a single card, Grand Theft Auto IV’s developers had the utter shortsightedness to not even bother including dual-graphics card support, thus guaranteeing that no one can get high quality performance in the game.

Grand Theft Auto IV suffers from a lethal combination of obnoxious DRM and terrible quality. How much longer can this situation go on for before PC gamers collectively exclaim “Enough!” and refuse to buy the rubbish that publishers seem so intent on feeding us?

We have previously discussed the release of Intel’s new Core i7 processor and all the changes that it brings.  Well, it has been a month, and the new processors and compatible motherboards are now readily available online at sites like www.newegg.com.

I have been itching to get my hands on one of these new processors, which by all accounts are a significant leap up from the Core 2 line.  Unfortunately (depending on how you look at it!), my current gaming rig has proven more than adequate for everything I have thrown at it.  While I can’t justify the expense, some of you might be interested in putting together a new high end gaming machine.  So, with that in mind, here is my current Core i7 build:

• CPU - $295 - Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66 GHz - Getting a 2.66 GHz quad core that would beat the crap out of an old 2.66 GHz Core 2 Quad for under $300 seems like a good deal to me.  Unfortunately, the next cheapest Core i7 is $570, so this is pretty much our only option.
• Motherboard - $245 - Gigabyte GA-EX58-DS4 - This is a bit of sticking point for me right now, actually.  The Core i7 uses a completely new CPU socket type, meaning there are only a small number of compatible motherboards currently available.  They are all pricey, with most in the $300 range.  The above motherboard has a PCI Express x16 and 2 PCI Express x8, so it could accommodate up to 3 high end graphics cards.  It takes up to 6 DDR3 RAM chips, has 8 channel onboard audio, and good onboard RAID.  So, at least you are getting some good features for your $245.
• Memory - $185 - G.SKILL 6 GB (3 x 2 GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1333 -  It is true that 6 GB of DDR2 800 would only cost you about $50.  However, $185 is not, in the grand scheme of things, that much to pay for memory.  G.SKILL has had a number of very popular RAM offerings on newegg and I don’t have any hesitation recommending them.
• Hard Drive - $110 - Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 RPM 1 TB - Depending on how much storage you want and whether or not you want to do RAID, you could get 1, 2, or even more of these hard drives.  From a gaming perspective, you might also want a faster, smaller hard drive to help minimize load times.  This would probably be a VelociRaptor or even a Solid State Drive.  However, I can’t honestly recommend doing this as the benefit is very low and the cost is comparatively high.
• Case - $70 - Enermax Chakra ECA3052B Black SECC ATX Mid Tower - Yes, I know this not a well known maker of high quality gaming cases.  However, this case is inexpensive, well constructed, and sports a 250 mm side fan for some serious, yet quiet, cooling.  I would probably throw in one or two 120 mm fans, in addition.  These can be ordered for a few dollars each.  One added bonus of this case: no unnecessary LED lights!
• Power Supply - $100 - Corsair CMPSU-650TX 650 W - This is a nice, affordable 650 watt power supply.  It has plenty of peripheral and SATA connectors, as well as a 4 or 8 pin CPU power connector, and two 6 + 2 pin PCI-X power connectors.  This will allow you to connect any single graphics card on the market today, as well as many 2 card configurations.
• DVD Drive - $25 - Samsung 22x DVD Burner Model SH-S223F - Not much to say about this one.  It is a DVD burner that will handle all of your CD / DVD drive needs.
• Video Card - $220 - $260 - We at last come to the most exciting part of building any gaming rig - the video card.  Here, I’ll give you a few options.  The EVGA 896-P3-1260-AR GeForce GTX 260 is a decent option at $220.  My card of choice, however, would be the HIS Hightech H487F512P Radeon HD 4870 at $230.  This card edges out the GTX 260 in most benchmarks.  For a little bit more power, you could also go with the EVGA 896-P3-1267-AR GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked.  The card costs $260, but it is based on the slightly more powerful GTX260 Core 216 and has been tested by EVGA to run at a stable 626 Mhz (compared to 576 Mhz stock).

That wraps up my build.  I have managed to keep the cost around $1300 and put together a pretty serious gaming machine.  Of course, if you were really looking to splurge you might want to spend an extra $200 or so and go for one of the high end video cards - probably the Radeon HD 4870×2.

There were a few areas where I would have to spend a bit more than I would like, mainly the motherboard and RAM.  However, I’m sure in the coming months that these costs will come down, making a Core i7 machine a very real possibility for me in the relatively near future.

On Thanksgiving, I arrived at my parents’ home a bit earlier than the rest of the family, so I had quite a bit of free time. I used most of it — four hours worth — to read Cormac McCarthy’s excellent post-apocalyptic novel The Road straight through in one go. It narrates a couple of months in the life of a father and son who have survived an unspecified apocalypse, but every description in the book — from bright flashes on the horizon during the incident, to the dusty, sunless world, to the skyscrapers in city centers whose metal frames were melted and then solidified back into torturedshapes — left me believing that this Armageddon was of the decidedly nuclear variety.

Naturally, on the day after Thanksgiving, I started playing Fallout 3, which is (as if you didn’t know by now) set in a post-nuclear-apocalyptic future. I must say, reading The Road was a great thematic introduction to the environment in Fallout 3, even so much as dealing with the some of the same tropes of cannibalism, scarce resources, and morality in a survivalist world that no longer has a place for it. Walking along decrepit ancient highways in the barren Capital Wasteland, with its gloomy skies and shattered landscapes, and picking through the wreckage of a former civilization, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was walking the same road as the main characters in the novel.

I will give The Road more points for being realistic, because just one decade after the apocalypse pretty much everything scavengeable is gone and the only food remaining is the occasional canned good or fellow human. Fallout 3, despite taking place two centuries further out from the apocalypse, is still full of pre-apocalypse goods, such as the bizarrely ubiquitous Nuka-Cola vending machines that still contain product. Oh, and there’s the mutants. But I’ll let this slide — The Road’s intent is to be a good novel, while Fallout 3’s intent is to be a fun game. Some concessions to gameplay are necessary and acceptable.

I’ve only reached level 5 so far (after quite a bit of time put into the game), but my overall impression is very positive. I pretty much agree with Grokmoo’s take on the game, and could potentially see myself playing it as much as he has. The game is superbly put together, and thanks to auto-travel, there’s never a boring moment (I’m looking at you, Far Cry 2). It’s also not too easy — I’ve had to make use of quick load on quite a few occasions — which is something I appreciate because most of the games I’ve played recently I’ve been able to steamroll through without much of a challenge at all.
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A fun little Flash game by the name of Robokill made the rounds on the Internet a couple of weeks ago, and it’s easy to see why. The game has high production values (for a Flash game, anyway), a leveling-up mechanic, a not-too-simplified inventory management system, and a fun combat mechanic. It’s well worth a play if you haven’t played it already, at least to the end of the free levels anyway. It’s good in many ways, but the one aspect I want to talk about, the combat mechanics, is great, and that’s what I’m going to focus the rest of this post on.

You control your robot’s movement with four directional keys (either WASD or the arrow keys). As is pretty standard, holding down two adjacent directional keys will let you move in a diagonal direction. Firing is controlled completely separately from movement; your robot shoots wherever you point the mouse cursor. It’s this freedom that makes the combat so much fun, which is no surprise since I’ve seen the mechanic before in another game I enjoyed very much: Geometry Wars. Robokill is basically Geometry Wars with an inventory/weapon customization component tacked on and the endless levels replaced with discrete rooms. I like the former modification, but not necessarily the latter.

In case you’ve never played Geometry Wars, there’s a clone of it for the PC called Grid Wars that I highly recommend. It’s actually better than Geometry Wars in several respects; having played all of the various versions, I prefer Grid Wars. What can I say? It just plays better with a mouse, although the version of Geometry Wars for the Nintendo DS does have a nice leveling up/collecting mechanic that persists across individual plays much like Robokill.

The main reason I like both Robokill and Grid Wars is the mechanic of freeform movement combined with independent freeform shooting. It’s a perfect recipe for hectic fun. In either game, if you stand still, you’re toast (in Grid Wars you’ll be swarmed, while in Robokill you’ll be swarmed and shot to pieces). So you always have to keep moving, and if you have any sense of how to play these games well, you know you have to keep moving towards areas where the concentration of enemies is lowest. In really crowded levels, this takes the form of blasting out a safe corridor to pass through. In levels where enemies are more concentrated, you’re generally running in one direction while shooting at the huge horde of enemies following closely behind you.

It’s the really hectic moments that combine both situations that are the most fun — when you’re being pursued by a large horde but also simultaneously having to deal with small groups of enemies along the path that you are running along. The only solution is to rapidly oscillate the direction that you’re shooting in, effectively dividing your fire — say, 30% toward clearing a path, 70% toward thinning the horde behind you — in an effort to find the formula that allows you to survive the longest in each given situation. Oh, and all the shooting in the world won’t do much good if your aim is off and you aren’t making each and every shot count.

Ultimately, both games have their merits. I like the persistence of Robokill’s customization across multiple games; in Grid Wars, you’re always starting from scratch, and there’s no plethora of weapons to choose from. But I also find that I’m just starting to have fun in any individual room in Robokill right before I’ve killed the last enemy. Grid Wars, with its endless levels of increasing numbers of enemies, means that the hectic screen-clearing fun never stops until your skills are no longer able to keep up. I wish there was some combination of the two. That would be a game I might never stop playing, to the detriment of this blog.

Good news for all the Fallout lovers out there!  Bethesda Softworks has announced their intention to release a Fallout 3 modding kit / editor, appropriately named the Garden of Eden Creation Kit (G.E.C.K) in December.  Also mentioned in the press release are three pieces of downloadable content scheduled for the next few months.

While I am personally not too excited about downloadable content, the news of a proper modding kit on the horizon has me very happy indeed.  Given the game’s very strong sales numbers, it seems almost certain that we will be seeing some excellent work from the modding community.

It occurs to me reading about this that there may be a somewhat hidden agenda behind the delay in the release of the mod tools for Fallout 3.  While it is fairly common for modding kits to lag behind the releases of their respective games, Bethesda has traditionally been pretty on the ball in terms of getting modding support out there early.  Could there be a political motivation behind the delay?

Simply put, having widespread modding support is now a potential liability for game publishers.  There are all sorts of possibilities for offensive material to be added to a game like Fallout 3.  Even if the shipped product did not contain the content, it is not hard to imagine a mainstream media outlet getting hold of a Fallout 3 child killing mod and creating a “Hot Coffee” style incident.  By December (Fallout 3 was released on October 28), Bethesda is probably betting that the attention will have reached a low enough level for a relatively safe release of the modding kit.

If this reasoning did play a factor in Bethesda’s decision to delay the modding kit, one can hardly blame them.  The last thing any game developer or publisher needs is a potentially very expensive lawsuit.  In any event, I look forward to seeing some high quality custom content for Fallout 3.

Word has reached me from my sources that World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King has has become the all time record holder for one day PC game sales, with 2.8 million copies sold.  At $40 per copy, this comes out to about $112 million in sales.

For comparison purposes, the one day sales record for consoles is currently held by Halo 3 with a figure of $170 million.  At the higher price point of $60 per copy, this again comes out to 2.8 million copies sold in one day.

While one day sales figures are hardly a measure of the health of the industry as a whole, it is interesting to note that even with the “decline” of PC gaming, sales records are still being made.   In fact, the records are even quite competitive with console sales records!

The truth is that PC gaming sales figures are still strong, they have just been shifted online and away from the traditional genres like first person shooters.  While the death of traditional genres may be disturbing to the more traditional crowd, the platform itself lives on.

I’m a huge fan of space shooters. I have been ever since I played the first TIE Fighter game on my dad’s 386 when I was still in elementary school. I played that game with a joystick plugged into the computer’s game port (Anyone remember those? The game port was analog). The genre has unfortunately declined since then, though my love for it hasn’t. I even have a modern USB joystick now, which I bought a year ago without even a specific game in mind out of a sheer sense of nostalgia for the genre. Alas, the last great space shooter I think I played was Freelancer, which came out over five years ago.

So you can imagine my excitement when I found out about the X3 series, which is a modern space shooter series created by German developer Egosoft. I decided to give the latest entry in the series, X3: Terran Conflict, a spin. After several hours of playtime, here’s my take.

X3: Terran Conflict is ultimately defined more by its flaws than by its successes. My major reaction to the game is a sense of sorrow over the potential of what could have been, a potential that tries desperately to shine through the game’s thick veneer of buggy execution. I guess we’ll start off on a high note and look at what the game does right.

The graphics are excellent, and really help to set the mood of being in space. I do have one minor quibble though: the asteroids don’t scale up the number of polygons composing them as you approach them, so while they look fine from far away, when you skim along the surface of the bigger ones you’re typically flying over triangles a kilometer to a side — not cool. Considering how detailed all of the rest of the models in the game are, with the exquisitely crafted space stations and the planets with multiple shading layers for atmosphere, terrain, and city lights, this is a very curious oversight.

The music, which I’ll roughly describe as ambient techno, really fits the theme of flying in space, and I enjoyed it a lot not only as a complement to the game but also simply as a fan of the genre. I guess it’s a good thing the developers are German, because it was evidently very easy for them to find talented techno artists to work with. The combination of the graphics and music sets an authentic mood of being in space, and I found I had the most fun when I simply turned down my engines and cruised through the stellar systems at a leisurely pace, taking in the sights and sounds.

But everything else about the game left me feeling a bit disappointed. The plot is so far completely forgettable, seeming to serve as nothing more than a way to introduce one to all of the star systems in an orderly manner. The voice acting is incredibly atrocious (every character sounds like they’re voiced by a German developer who doesn’t quite possess mastery over the English language) and the poorly animated comms portraits don’t help establish connections to the game’s characters in the slightest. The missions are bizarrely paced, with one early mission requiring me to follow an enemy moving at a slow pace through several stellar systems before following him from the terminal jump gate to a pirate ship that was really far away. Even with the game’s built-in time acceleration turned up to its maximum of 1000%, it still took me something like an hour to complete this completely trivial mission. It didn’t help that the autopilot would occasionally drive me right into another spaceship, forcing a reload from the last space station — oh, did I mention that there’s no quicksave/quickload? Gahhh!
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Game-ism explains better than we could why we like Team Fortress 2 so much. The secret is the lack of straight-line weapons that I originally lamented when I first came to Team Fortress Classic, then quickly realized the genius of. You simply can’t have a varied class-based gameplay experience when all of the weapons are realistic (that is to say, they fire in straight lines, like normal firearms). It takes the removal of all of that vanilla stuff to allow true variation.

I’ve been playing around with the Left 4 Dead demo this past week, and I’ve finally reached a conclusion on it: I think I’ll be passing on buying the game. Grokmoo feels much the same way, and we’re pretty much in agreement as to why:

First of all, I feel kind of misled by Left 4 Dead. I went into it expecting a zombie game (which admittedly might just have been me not paying careful attention), but what I got was an infection game. Thus, instead of slow-moving, hard-to-kill cannibalistic reanimated corpses to tango with, you get “infected” people running at you abnormally quickly who go down if you so much as glance them with a round. Maybe that last part is a result of the difficulty level scaling, which seems to cut back on enemy health as well as enemy numbers. But my final take on this matter is that zombies should not run because it goes against all of their history.

Ignoring what I expected the game to be, and just examining the actual game as is, I’m still left unimpressed. I did have a bit of fun playing online, but that was mostly because I teamed up with a Scotsman I met in Team Fortress 2 (thank you, Steam Community feature) who is absolutely hysterical. The weapons aren’t particularly exciting, and ammo is so plentiful that it completely does away with the need for ammo conservation, which is definitely one of the strongest mechanics that games in the survival horror genre have going for them. Not only do the pistols have infinite ammo, but the primary weapons come with such large numbers of rounds (500 for the SMG, 128 for the shotgun) that you rarely even need to worry about swapping down to pistols to save on ammo.

And the weapons are so powerful that it doesn’t feel particularly satisfying killing enemies. You can get headshots, but there isn’t really a reason to bother. Now if we were dealing with the undead in this game, where if you shot off a limb they’d simply keep on coming (albeit a bit more slowly), that’d be a lot more fun, and it would make headshots worthwhile. But as it is you can fire a shotgun blast and pretty much every normal enemy in the cone of fire instantly drops dead, even if they are really far away. The only times enemies pose a threat is when a large number of them come from all sides, or when dealing with one of the game’s several types of special enemies.

Another problem with the game, and this one is really hard to articulate, is that fast-paced combat just sort of feels stuttery, glitchy, and finnicky. I don’t know if the network code isn’t up to par, or I was just frequently connected to lagging servers, or what, but shots didn’t always seem to hit where they should have, enemies were kind of “jumpy” in all the wrong ways, and that oh-so-important FPS “feel” was just imperceptibly off.
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