PC Game Fun Time

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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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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The long wait is finally over, and after many years of hype, Spore has finally been released. This news was immediately greeted with a huge backlash against the malfeasant Digital Restrictions Management included with the game, which limits each purchased copy of the game to three installations — ever. I’ve written about DRM multiple times in the past, so I don’t feel compelled to take this opportunity to make any statement on DRM beyond reiterating how terrible it is for the consumer. And judging by all of the negative reviews Spore’s DRM has engendered on Amazon, even Electronic Arts has to be questioning whether including such draconian DRM was worth it. As I write this, Spore has 934 one-star reviews out of 1,011 reviews total, a number that is only going to increase dramatically over the coming days.

No, what I really want to address about Spore is its failure to live up to the amazing game play that it once promised, an issue that has been mostly lost amongst all of the (justifiable) complaining over the DRM (although Ars Technica didn’t fail to take notice). What really sold me on Spore from the first times I read about it was the promise of truly being able to design a creature. I remember marveling at how all aspects of a creature were supposed to be procedurally generated based solely on the design of the creature. The characteristics of the legs you designed would affect how well the creature would be able to move — its gait, its stride, its jumping height, etc. Ditto for every other component of the animal. I was instantly fantasizing of three-legged creatures with a single exceptionally long appendage used for striking. Such a feature has never evolved naturally on Earth, either by chance or because natural selection is not conducive to creating it. The real appeal of Spore, to me, was being able to test out all sorts of bizarre intelligently designed body configurations that do not appear in the natural world to find the most effective ones. And it would be very telling if the most effective predators in the games looked curiously similar to tigers, lions, and bears.

Combine this ability to truly design your own creature with the Sporepedia, which lets you match up your creations against everyone else’s, and Spore would’ve been amazing. I could easily see myself spending days trying to tweak the ultimate predator, able to kill as many of the creatures created by other people as possible. But alas, such a thing is not possible with Spore the way it ended up, because the ability to truly design creatures was removed at some point during the development process (probably because it ended up being exceptionally difficult to do correctly). Don’t get me wrong, you still have the ability to fine tune the appearance of creatures to your heart’s content, but it is all cosmetic. The finished version of Spore, unfortunately, shipped with an ability-generation system that is all-too-familiar, not revolutionary.

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