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.

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.

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?

It has been a long time since the days of Windows 98. While the famous “Blue Screen of Death” was a common occurrence for users of that operating system, most of our readers have probably only seen a handful of full-blown computer crashes in say, the past year.

Unfortunately, while Microsoft operating system stability has improved by leaps and bounds since the 90’s, the same can not really be said for the games that run on Microsoft operating systems. At least these days when a game crashes, you generally only need to restart the game, not the whole computer. But many PC games, even the very high profile big budget titles, still crash with distressing regularity.

For a recent example, look at Fallout 3, a game that has sold a lot of copies and received a huge amount of press.  The latest patch supposedly fixed several crashes related to alt-tabbing behavior and updating the game.  I did not experience these crashes.  I have however had a steam specific problem: unless I disable the steam “in-game” client, Fallout 3 crashes immediately at startup, every time.  This is obviously not an issue that affects every player, or it would have been fixed by now.  Still, it is an issue that affects me, and it is quite annoying - when I play TF2, I really want to have the Steam in game options, so I have to enable / disable this feature every time I want to switch between games.

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Much has been made about Blizzard’s recent announcement that StarCraft 2 will be released as a trilogy. For those who don’t know, the basic story is that the initial release of the game will include the multi-player portion of the game, and the campaign for the Terran side, one of three sides (Terran, Zerg and Protoss) featured in the game.

This has generated a lot of controversy online, with people unhappy about having to pay for three games. While I understand where they are coming from, I also think this move on Blizzard’s part can make a good deal of sense from both a business and a gaming point of view. I’m going to try to explain this below as best I can.

To start off, we need to consider Blizzard as a company. Here’s how I see Blizzard: as a high-quality creator of commercial games. You can’t argue that World of Warcraft is a polished product (I’m sure there are rough edges, don’t get me wrong. But the average person doesn’t see those the first time through.), you can’t argue that StarCraft, Warcraft III, or Diablo II weren’t polished products. Blizzard is the James Patterson or Robert Ludlum of the gaming industry: they are dedicated to the craft of creating tight, vivid, readable (playable, in Blizzard’s case) titles. You can never tell me that Patterson has a dedication to literary craft. You can never tell me that Blizzard has a dedication to a deep or, well, complicated gaming experience. Blizzard makes games to get the widest following possible so they can make the most money possible. Nothing inherently wrong with that, it’s just the kind of games they choose to make.

As for my favorite game companies over the years, Cavedog, Black Isle, Warren Spector’s ION Storm Austin, Irrational Games, and Stardock, I see them as creators of interesting games. Total Annihilation wasn’t and isn’t the most polished game in existence (although it tightened up considerably from the original 1.0 to 3.1). Neither is Deus Ex, Freedom Force, Galactic Civilizations II, or five or ten of my other favorites that I could name. But here’s the key with all these games: Depth. Total Annihilation is, to me, almost infinitely replayable to me even in unmodded form, because of how many different ways there are to play it. Deus Ex is mind-blowingly deep for its era when you consider how many different ways you can play it. Same for Fallout and Freedom Force. These are not games that will truly appeal to a wide cross section of the gaming and non-gaming populace.

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The videogame industry is in the midst of a booming trend towards realism in games. In the first few generations of videogames, the graphics were sufficiently bad that they couldn’t come close to mimicking anything real anyway, so designers didn’t even try; hence Italian plumbers jumping on side-stepping anthropomorphic mushrooms. But shortly thereafter, rotoscoping lead to the first generation of videogames that tried to be realistic, and the trend has continued picking up pace to this very day.

This is how we find ourselves confronted with Far Cry 2, a game that tries so hard to be realistic that it only succeeds in highlighting, with neon strobes, the differences between the game world and the real world. If Far Cry 2 actually wanted to be realistic, it could have easily done so. Look at America’s Army as a good example of FPS realism: there’s no respawning, and medics can’t cure wounds; the best they can do is stabilize your condition so you don’t keep getting worse. Far Cry 2 is no America’s Army: it’s a traditional FPS that tries to disguise the non-realistic trappings of the genre, and fails horribly at it.

Far Cry 2 uses the amorphous concept of hit points like pretty much every first person shooter, but doesn’t label it as such. Get dinged up in a fight? Simply inject yourself — the game doesn’t make it clear what it is, but it’s presumably something like epinephrine — and your wounds are magically healed. Unless you’ve been badly wounded, in which case you first need to use pliers to extract the bullet from your gaping wound before giving yourself the shot. Because, and this is a little known fact, when you’re shot with a bullet, all the damage is actually caused by the presence of the bullet in your body (not the huge gaping hole it ripped through it), and so all gunshot wounds can be cured simply by removing the bullet. And, logically, gunshot wounds where the bullet passes entirely through you are self-curing. The injection system fails so badly at conveying realism that the only way to really explain it is by using the trappings of the FPS genre: those syringes must be full of pure, uncut, unadulterated liquid hit points, much like how the injections in Bioshock could best be explained as liquid mana.

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