PC Game Fun Time

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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It has been a while since I posted my “final” review of Fallout 3 indicating my disappointment with the game’s ending.  In that time, I have started a new character and brought him up currently about level 10.

Let me just start by saying the second playthrough has been better than the first.  It turns out that on my first time playing, I barely scratched the surface of all the weird and awesome sidequests available.  Since I had scarcely explored the northern half of the map on my first time through, I promptly headed off North on my second attempt.  Almost immediately, I encountered several brilliantly crafted (and also totally bizarre) sidequests.

I won’t spoil the surprise for those of you who are still planning on putting some time into the game.  Suffice it to say, however, that Fallout 3 is a huge game, and sticking even roughly to the main quest throughout will cause you to miss all but a tiny fraction of it.

My second play experience has also proven quite a bit harder than my first.  Instead of pumping tons of points into small guns and turning myself into a sniper rifle wielding head exploding machine, I have been mostly focusing on big guns and energy weapons.  Unfortunately, at this stage of the game I have found almost no energy weapons, and big gun ammo has been scarce.  So, I have been forced to rely on my assault rifle a fair amount.

This has also led me to making some use of explosives and the game’s homemade weapons system.  While it is not particularly robust (there are only a relatively small number of predefined schematics to be found in the game world) it is still a lot of fun.  The homemade bottlecap mines, for example, are incredibly effective, almost ridiculously so.  While your mileage may vary depending on how you distribute your skill points, for me they do about 5 times as much damage as the standard frag mines.

The weapon crafting system seems like an area that should be ripe for modding.  Unfortunately, mum is still the word from Bethesda on the release of an editor like we had for Oblivion.  While smaller mods have sprung up anyway, without a dedicated toolset the chances of a large, successful modding community sustaining itself are pretty slim.

Even without mods, Fallout 3 is offering a lot of replay value rarely found in a game.  But with a large modding community, Fallout 3 could be so much more.  I continue to hope for an official release of an editor from Bethesda.  I am pretty optimistic that this will happen.  I just hope it comes soon enough that there is still interest in using it.

TechRadar’s list of twelve reasons PC gaming is better than console gaming is a fun little read. I’ll admit, I was thinking of doing something similar on this site for awhile (although better fleshed out), but in the end thought better of it, because I don’t think gloating is particularly helpful. PC gaming faces some severe challenges over the coming years. Series that used to be PC-exclusive are now regularly being released on consoles as well for profitability rationales that are impossible to refute. Now while that isn’t bad on its face, the amount of dumbing down that too often goes along with it is.

The only genre that I would really say that is thriving on the PC above and beyond consoles is the MMORPG, which doesn’t exactly help me much. I have an MMORPG post still in the works, but the gist of it is that, following experience with The Realm Online, EverQuest, and then World of Warcraft, I no longer allow myself to play MMORPGs as a concession towards ensuring my own wellbeing. Other genres that are still doing well on PC over the console include strategy games, both the real-time and turn-based varieties. Regrettably, we seem to have lost the first-person shooter.

So yes, while it is mindless fun to point and gloat at consoles’ problems, including red rings of death, their “discovery” of high-def roughly a decade after the PC, and proprietary lock-in, I think it’d be more constructive to make a list of the the areas where PC gaming suffers in comparison to console games, and then make all efforts to rectify them. My number one complaint is how console games “just work”, while the Digital Restrictions Management software included in nearly all new PC games introduces a flummoxing plethora of potential pitfalls that turns many potential PC gamers to consoles in search of a less frustrating gaming experience. What’s your biggest complaint?

While we seem to be doing a little to much gushing over Stardock around here of late, I feel like this news is noteworthy.

Stardock has continued their tradition of releasing major free updates for already released games.  Their latest free “patch” for the Galactic Civilizations II trilogy (the original game and 2 expansion packs) would almost put some expansion packs to shame (I’m looking at you, Sims!)

This update adds a bunch of new features, including new more varied game setup options, improved graphics, a substantially revised espionage system and new diplomacy options.  It also adds some of the usual game balance improvements and bugfixes.

It would be nice if more developers would show this kind of continuing commitment to an already released game.  Stardock has publicly stated that there will be no more official expansion packs for Gal Civ II and there is no monthly fee for playing.  However, the decision to add these “content updates” still makes good business sense, as I’m certain each substantial update generates some additional sales for Stardock.

Maybe there is still hope that someday most developers will actually care about and even take pride in their games.

Supreme Commander 2, the sequel to … well … Supreme Commander, has been announced, though no release date is yet set. And it’s going to be published by Square Enix, which makes it the company’s first foray outside of the Japanese game development market, and also a large departure from the usual big-haired angsty hero RPG fare.

For those of you who may not be aware, Supreme Commander was the spiritual successor (designed by the same guy, Chris Taylor) to the late-90s real-time strategy masterpiece Total Annihilation. Supreme Commander ultimately wasn’t quite as legendary as its predecessor, but it was quite good, and Grokmoo and I spent many months playing it. We even ran a dedicated community blog. Here’s hoping that the sequel surpasses it. My main problem with Supreme Commander was that the endgame wasn’t particularly good, with potentially hours worth of build-up to a resolution that typically lasted a minute at most. The exponential ramp-up of economic structures, which allowed one to construct huge armies entirely independently of any strategic need to control resources on the map, led to massive, massive turtling, which felt more like SimCity with a disaster thrown in at the end than the strategic give-and-take, feint-and-assault one typically expects from an RTS.

I think Chris Taylor is aware of the criticisms of Supreme Commander and should be able to use the lessons learned from it to great effect with the sequel. Supreme Commander was revolutionary, but uneven around the edges. All Supreme Commander 2 has to do to be a masterpiece is to be evolutionary. And Chris: Please don’t make the same mistake of having such ridiculously high system requirements as Supreme Commander. As a college student at the time, I was definitely in your target market, but the only way I was able to play the game was to build a computer good enough to run it — and the only reason I could afford that was because of my scholarship. Look at the success of World of Warcraft, which succeeds partially because it prioritizes running on moderate hardware over absolute cutting-edge visuals, and ask yourself if that really was such a bad idea.