Frozen Synapse

I have always been a huge fan of the turn based tactical isometric games such as Jagged Alliance, JA2, Xcom..etc..  For whatever reason that style of meticulous gameplay always appealed to me, but I had always assumed I was alone in my passion because those games never seemed to last very long in favor of first person shooters or real time strategy games..etc..

In fact, the industry as a whole has completely moved away from turn based game play, which I find to be a shame. Well thank god there are awesome independent developers around to fill the void!

Frozen Synapse is just the turn based top down tactical game that I have been craving for years.  It has a wonderfully fun and even somewhat dark sense of humor and most importantly, awesome gameplay.

There is nothing better than a game with deceptively simple gameplay that provides hours and hours of fun because it’s extremely challenging to master..

Plus it’s multiplayer!!  How awesome is that?!

I can’t tell you the number of times I said that XCom needed to be multiplayer so that I could play against my friends.. And sure as heck they did it here..

The interface is a little confusing at first, as it takes some time to understand what all the different commands do..  Plus as a whole the interface is kinda weak, but other than that I think this is an excellent game.

I wish I could give each character more than the one weapon, but I understand why they did things the way they did and so I wont ding them on that.. All in all I think it’s a very good game guys.. well done.

4.5 out of 5 losing that half for some interface suckery..   Still, if you know me.. 4.5 is an awesome score.

Red Faction: Armageddon

I played Red Faction back in 2001 when it first came out and enjoyed the heck out of it.   It was the very first game to come out with the Geo-Mod game engine which allowed for massive destruction of the game models and levels.   The game itself was otherwise unremarkable, but the fact that you could destroy everything made it awesome.

I find it funny that one little thing like that can make or break a game entirely, and the massively destructable nature of the Red Faction games entirely “makes” these titles.

Red Faction II was one of those games that came out only a year or so later but it managed to skip my notice and the series sorta fell off my radar.

The other day I picked up the latest in the franchise; Red Faction: Armageddon.   And I’m glad to say that it’s up to the original games standards in all ways .. to include the shortcomings..

Let me start by saying that by all standards it’s a good game all things considered, and I did enjoy it.  But there are some cons:

This game is of course plagued by one of my common complaints with all games these days;  The game is too short.. by a long shot..  That’s typical of all games though so I think the industry as a whole is trying to bring our game length expectations down fraction by fraction until we get a 3 hour tour for the same $60.  Oh well.. This game is longer than some, and I realize that for every minute of gameplay it likely takes them months.. but still..  This game clocks in at about 10 hours.

And it also suffers from another common issue with games these days;  Its too easy..   My theory as to why this happens lately is because most of the modern games are first made for consoles, and then ported to PC.. as such the controls on a PC are much easier to use, so the situations you’re in are suddenly that much easier?  This is a wild guess, but it will likely seem logical to anyone who has tried (and failed horribly) to play a game on a console using those crap controllers..  I can see how any game would be difficult if you handicap someone with one of those damn things..

Most games have at least 4 difficulty settings; Easy, Normal, Hard and Expert.. Or some myriad of names that equate to the same thing..  And in just about every game out there, I know that I should start playing it on “Hard” because anything easier would be pointless.   I can’t imagine how simplistic and juvenile “Easy” must be on these games because “Hard” is anything but..  This game suffers badly in this area because even on “Hard” I didn’t find it remotely challenging.  ”Hard” should be difficult.  Make it a challenge so that I will want to play through again..

I think its likely that game makers are afraid of making their games actually difficult because then people might get frustrated and stop playing.. However, I’m of the opinion that making a game like this too easy even when set on “hard” in order to keep the game “fun” is akin to handing the little league losers a trophy for participation..   Reward me for doing well, not for just showing up.  If I set the game to “hard” I believe it’s reasonable to expect the game to actually be difficult.

And finally my major complaint about the game is the weapons they give you.    Within the first minute or two of gameplay they give you the ONLY WEAPON YOU WILL EVER NEED; the gravity gun.   Now, I don’t want to complain about the gravity gun.. there is nothing more fun that hurling a whole building of destructive debris at an enemy.. and you generally have a reasonable expectation of doing fairly well when you use the same gun to hurl an enemy at a far wall only to watch him gib.     But, why do I need the other guns?

They give you a whole slew of other wizbang cool guns and more ammo than you can shake a stick at just lying around but I can honestly say I didn’t even start using ANY of them until near the very end of the game.  Up to that point I just used the gravity gun to do everything..   Either tossing the mobs around or throwing entire structures at them..  The other guns seemed pointless mostly.. and the ludicrous amounts of ammo lying around, doubly so.

This game is also extremely linear, so much so if you get out of the “area” you’re supposed to be in a countdown to your doom will appear.. better boogy back to where you’re supposed to be pronto..  I don’t really want to hold this up as a complaint though, this isn’t a sandbox game and like the original was never meant to be..   Still I can see how some might be put off by the count down thing..

All in all though I enjoyed the game.   There is still something very appealing about being about appease your darker side by waging wanton destruction on the carefully designed levels..  And if you’re not giddily giggling like a school girl over being about to toss mobs around like rag dolls to their ultimate doom, then you don’t know how to have a good time..  it was fun.  Though it’s replayability is pretty much zero.

I give this game 3.5 out of 5. (That’s a good score from me.)

Toiletduck's World of Tanks Contour Icons

So I find that I am still playing quite a lot of World of Tanks.  Great game!  I’m having a lot of fun with it.   However, I think the UI needs a bit of work.  One of the areas where I think it lacks is with regards to the vehicle icons, which are very uninformative.

So with that, I made my own and offer them for download here:

Toiletducks World of Tanks Contour Icons.zip

Game Version: v.0.6.5
File Size: 1,476 KB

For now the armor values only reflect the hull values of the vehicle in question.   In my next iteration I am thinking of showing the lowest value between the hull and turret and giving some indication as to which you should aim for..etc..   Still pondering it.

A couple screenshots below if the icons in action.  Feedback is appreciated.

Icon Installation:

Step 1.  LOCATE YOUR WOT INSTALL
	Locate your World of Tanks Install directory.   For the purposes of
	these instructions we assume your WOT game directory is
	C:\World_of_tanks
	If you're unsure, right click the game icon, choose properties
	and it should tell you there.

Step 2.  OPEN THE ZIP FILE
	Open the downloaded zip file containing the new Icons.
	Don't extract them yet, we can just drag right out of
	the zip archive window to the destination.

Step 3.  BACK UP OLD ICONS!
	In Explorer go to C:\World_of_Tanks\res\gui\maps\icons\vehicle and
	right click over the "contour" directory and select "RENAME".  Rename
	this directory to "contour-bak".  This will save our current icons.

Step 4.  DRAG AND DROP
	Drag the "contour" directory from the zip file, to the explorer window
	vehicle directory. You should now see 3 directories in that folder and
	a lot of TGA files.  Those three directories are; contour, contour-bak,
	and small.  

	This installs the icons, but not the flash files.  If you ever don't
	want to use the icons any longer simply delete/rename the contour
	directory and then rename contour-bak to contour.

Step 5.  BACK UP OLD FLASH!
	In Explorer go to c:\World_of_Tanks\res\gui\flash and right click and
	rename each of the following files;

	battleloading.swf
	PlayersPanel.swf
	StatisticForm.swf

Step 6.  DRAG AND DROP, Again
	Once those are all named -bak or whatever, drag the 3 .swf files
	from the zip file, to the explorer window flash directory.

	This installs the flash files required to take advantage of the
	new icons.
	Note this step is NOT 100% necessary but if you don't do it, the
	enemy icons will be backwards.  Again if you ever want to uninstall
	these icons simply remove and rename the old files and you're good
	to go.

Dragon Age II

So in my Dragon Age review I began by asking “Can Bioware do no wrong?”   Apparently the answer is “Yes.”

I had originally mocked Bioware in my first review for taking 4 years to produce the first game.. Now suddenly that didn’t seem like such a bad idea, as Dragon Age II (DA2) the supposed successor, was rushed out the door in just over 8 months and it shows.  DA2 just doesn’t compare to Dragon Age – Origins (DA:O).

Now I realize that I’m giving the impression that I didn’t think DA2 was a good game, that’s not the case.. I think it was a good game by itself, but it just didn’t meet up with the expectations nor match the precedent that was set with DA:O.

So, I want to say that Yes, DA2 is a good game on its own merits.   But if you go in expecting DA:O version two, you’re going to be disappointed.

The thing I liked about DA:O was that it was an epic game, and epic in it’s story telling.  They did an excellent job in making the player feel like he was a part of a bigger world.   The game itself was fricken huge, with a lot of unique areas and places to go, things to see.. monsters to kill.. And there wasn’t a lot of repeating of those areas.

One of the biggest issues with DA2 is they constantly reused the same dungeon, cave, map over and over just blocking off areas to keep you from going there this time..  This gets old fast and the 10th time I went into a random cave only to be on the same map I have done previously, I got kinda fed up.  This was a really cheap way to reuse content and the game suffered a lot for it.   Take a couple extra months and give us more areas so we aren’t constantly walking in our own footsteps..

I did very much like how they told the story through the dwarf character, I thought that was quite clever indeed.. But it never “drew me in”.  I don’t really know why but I never really felt like I was part of the story, just an outside observer of it..

Plus they completely removed the customizability of the previous game with regards to gear and equipping your secondary characters, or even for your main character to have a secondary slot of weapons.. These things were staples of the first game, gone in the second.  Why?

Stability wise I think they missed the mark too as the game crashes on me quite a lot.  Of my friends though, apparently I am the only person that this happens to so I’m willing to accept that it’s me or my hardware.

Graphics and engine wise the game is as good as the first one, with the only notable difference is how you interact with your characters.   You can interact with your character more like a MMO than like the first game and that’s a good thing, though it may be playing a big role in how different the game feels.

Things that are better than the first game;

The Tactic System – The tactic system got better, thank you very much Bioware.  Huge points from me there.  However you still don’t have a “reset” tactic that can be used to turn stuff off when combat ends.   Still its better than the first game for sure and your characters seem to be smarter about following them.  I pretty much automated my characters completely and only played my main toon which was the whole point.  Every once in a while I had to actually pause the game and redirect, but for the most part that wasn’t necessary.   In the first game I pretty much paused every other second to redirect someone.

The Difficulty —  The game is actually fricken hard, when you play it on hard.   The first game I played on hard the first time through and impossible on the second time through without too much trouble.  This game, even hard is too dang hard.  That’s a good thing!  Hard should be hard.

Ranged Rogues — Ranged rogues don’t suck!  YAY!  Bows in the old game and ranged attacks in general were completely worthless..  The new game, not so much.. in fact not at all!  Thank you for this.

Magic — Magic in general seems much more impressive.  It not only does more damage but it does it with style.

etc..  Lots of little things that they did do better..  It’s just the feeling of the game is less epic.. Less grand..  Comparing it to another favorite franchise; Mass Effect 2 was a far better game than Mass Effect.   Dragon Age 2 wasn’t far better than Dragon Age – Origins.   It was just different…

I feel like if you loved Origins, you’ll hate DA2 or not really identify with it as much.  Where as if you really didn’t get into Origins, you’ll love DA2.

So it may be unfair to say that Bioware did wrong with DA2.  I just was expecting something different than I got..  I haven’t quite finished the game yet, I’ll knock it out and get back to you.

So in a fit of boredom last night I downloaded an indy game off Steam called “NightSky” for the low price of $9.

What a great game!  Extremely simple in concept, elegantly produced with a level of depth and complexity that a lot of modern big company games fail to match.

In NightSky the player controls a glowing sphere that they found on the beach through a nighttime shadowed series of mazes and puzzles.  You have limited and often changing control over the sphere, but most of the time you can accelerate and decelerate the sphere, make it go super fast or have a sticky like brake.  In some cases you can even invert gravity and in others there are pinball like flippers.  Fun!

The goal is to use the physics engine and your limited controls to guide the sphere through all of the different worlds which are divided into a number of three-screen sections with each section containing a challenge or puzzle.

My complaints for this game are few but you know me; I always have some.

1.  You can’t control the screen resolution.  The game is either Windowed at 600×340, Maximized which gives you a black screen with 600×340 in the center where the game is, or full screen in which it changes your monitor resolution down to that small.. Ugh.. Seriously?!   My Desktop resolution is 5520×1200..  This game looks like a postage stamp by comparison forcing me to play it in the full screen mode which jacks up my other two monitors..  I really don’t like this and seems an odd choice all things considered.

That’s it!  There it is.. the only complaint I can find..   If you read my game reviews I can always find a lot of things to complain about.. but I got nothing else..

All in all I give this game a 4.5 out of 5 and say get it!  It’s a lot of fun and considering how small a team put it together they deserve the money.  Yet another perfect example of how simple elegant game play will win over big budget massive game every time.  Take note big developers, game play wins!

To Nicklas Nygren and the Nifflas crew I say thanks a lot!  This is a keeper..

Tiger II

When I heard a buddy of mine tell me that he was playing a game called “World of Tanks” I thought he was kidding.. I thought he was making some reference to “tanking” in World of Warcraft or something.. But no, he was serious..

Who on Earth would name their game this?! Well.. Apparently Wargaming.net and BigWorld Technology that’s who..

World of Tanks is a real first person shooter style game currently in open beta in which you get to drive tanks, tank destoyers and/or self propelled guns around fairly large maps all with the goal of mass destruction, mayhem and general killing of your fellow man.  Booyah!  Who wouldn’t like that right?

I have to admit, its a lot of fun but has a lot of flaws that I’m concerned about..  But first the good!

They have a LOT of tanks.  Light, Medium, Heavy, Tank Destroyers of every flavor and even Artillery if that’s your speed..  You’re thrust on to one of a dozen or more (not sure how many all told) maps with 15 people per side and you fight it out until your team is the last standing..

You can currently choose from Russian, German and USA when buying your tanks and you’re never restricted to a side.  You can easily go up the Russian tech tree and the German tech tree at the same time.  By the time of release they have stated that they will have fleshed out the USA tree (its kinda broken at the moment and missing tank destroyers entirely), as well as adding French and Japanese tanks.  I even heard rumor of British.. Awesome..

It’s a lot of fun, and I liken it to a really slow first person shooter..  Unlike most FPS style games you go go go, but you have no choice but to go slower in this game as tanks don’t move that fast, barrels are slow to traverse, reload times are slow..etc..  And if you do manage to get in a light tank and zip up to the front line you’re likely to die very quickly as.. well.. light tanks are light for a reason..   So you have to play this game kinda slowly and carefully.. That’s appealing..

The games themselves are usually 5 to 15 minutes long and can never go beyond 15 minutes, plus if you do die early you can always bail on that game to start up another one while waiting for that game to finish.. So you’re never just sitting there waiting for the next round like some FPS games..  If at the end of 15 minutes there isn’t a resolution (all dead on one side or the flag is captured) then it’s a draw.  I have played over 300 games and this has happened once.

The objects on the terrain are completely destructible.. (for the most part)  Don’t like that house in your way?  Drive through it!! Or shoot it.. And it’s free to play!!  Even after release they have a free to play model but it will be slow going for you.. but still free is good..

But.. now we get to the bad.. You see the game has a lot of problems too that are starting to effect my fun:

Completely Silent Devs:  As with any game, the developers are non-existent.  We hear nothing as players and all our pleas, prayers and questions go unanswered.   This is the unfortunate trend in the gaming industry that has been going on for years and all it does is piss off customers.  Mums the word and that blows.

They also appear to have an extremely slow development cycle or their iterations are very long as patches seem to come rather infrequently.. If ever..

Zero Control:  Currently there is absolutely no way to choose which map you want to play on.  When you queue for a battle you’re thrown into the first available “room” with a random group of people in random vehicles, on a random map.  Okay Fight! This sucks and leads to a lot of issues where you’re in a room with people that have tanks 4 and 5 tiers above yours.   Many times have I felt like I brought a bb-gun to a bazooka-fest because I happened to be in my T3 tank going against t8 behemoths..

I want to be able to to decide what vehicle I’m in for what map.  If I’m in a heavy city fight, I don’t want to bring artillery..etc..   I want to be able to switch guns to suit the situation and you just can’t, you have to make due with whatever you’re given.

I want to be able to see who/what is queueing so that I can decide to stay or go.. If I know I’m not going to be effective in a battle due to being in too small a kit then I need the ability to opt-out.  But you can’t, you’re in it for the fight until your tank gets turned into a smoking hole.. and it will..  This isn’t fun..

Physics Model:  The game has a very poor if non-existent physics model, as such it’s possible sometimes to hang a tank off a cliff and fire down the slope in such a way as to defy gravity..  In reality the tank would take a tumble.. This is silly and makes it impossible in some cases to be safe down a hill from someone.  Where as you should be safe because they can’t dip their gun low enough.. but.. no.

Graphics Engine:  The graphics engine itself is a tad dated.. It’s not bad looking by any stretch of the meaning, but it’s not the most modern thing either, add to that the pretty bad memory leak issues they can’t seem to plug and things start to fall apart fairly quickly.. Frustrating having to restart the client every hour or so..

Damage Model:  There seems to be some pretty big issues with the damage model right now too..  Huge tanks firing Volkswagen sized shells at smaller tanks quite often do no damage what so ever.. This is frustrating and leads to a lot of odd damage issues where you should be able to kill a tank 2 or 3 tiers your junior but can’t because for some reason they are impenetrable..  This is frustrating as hell..

Tank Tracks:  It seems that the tank tracks for any given vehicle are made of papier-mâché in that if you even bump another tank the damn things fall off and you have to just sit there and wait for your crew to fix it..  This is extremely annoying to say the least..

Line of Sight:  Easily the biggest issue though is the line of sight system they have implemented by which tanks constantly just up and vanish..  Unlike other first person shooters where people are always rendered as they run around the map and you have to spot them yourself.. this game has opted for a weird system by which enemy tanks are completely invisible (read: not rendered by the graphics engine) if your “crew can’t see them”..

THIS SUCKS.  This sucks because half the time you could be and often are a very short distance from an enemy tank that you would otherwise absolutely see.. but just doesn’t get rendered.. At all.  Until suddenly POP! There he is!  And it seems to be completely random for each individual..

So, for you the enemy tank is invisible.. But for him he sees you just fine, and is shooting you..  So you’re dying but you can’t see the enemy tank that’s shooting you mere feet away because your crew has their heads up their asses..

This is an absolute game breaker!  They have to fix this or the game will be doomed to fail.  And such an easy fix too!  Render everyone, all the time.  Done.

Grouping:  The game is “free to play” and as such anyone can download it and get in but in order to group up with a friend you have to have paid for the “Premium” access.  This sucks as it doesn’t allow players to introduce a friend to it for free.. This is dumb of them, they need to allow anyone to group, free player or paid player.

Not an MMO: They tout the game as an MMO but it’s very much not.  It’s more along the lines of “Counterstrike with Tanks”.  The largest battle you can have (the only battle you can have at this time) is a 15 on 15 battle, and 30 people aint massive.  It’s just a FPS, most FPS games are pay-once/play free games.   This game smacks of a company trying to get people to pay a monthly subscription for a really small amount of content that other games give away for free.  Imagine if Counterstrike, or Call of Duty tried to charge a monthly fee..

Match Making:  The match making system is broken right now in that I’m currently, as I type this, in a game where a tier 3 vehicle is on the same map as a tier 9 vehicle..  That’s completely silly as the tier 3 Marder can’t do anything to a tier 9 IS-4..

I mean come on, that’s not even remotely fair to the Marder player..  The biggest gun the Marder can fit fires an average pen of 158 points of damage using the expensive ammo that costs real money (118 for the free stuff that people are actually using) where as the armor on the IS-4 is 160..  So the Marder actually can’t do anything against this tank..    I’m pretty sure the Marder player didn’t join the game in the hopes of being cannon fodder..

The match tier range needs to be limited to one or two levels at most.. 3 at the absolute outside.. otherwise you end up with a bunch of folks on the map who can’t contribute to the match at all, but count as slots for that team.   Whats more is we have that one tier 3, and two tier 4s on our team where as the opposite team’s lowest tiered tank is a tier 6..   Guess which side won..

Balance:  I realize fully that due to the sheer volume of different tanks and vehicles its going to be near impossible to balance the tanks.  And at some point you have to accept that certain tanks suck when compared directly with other specific tanks..etc..  But it really seems that all of the American tanks, suck horribly.. Where as all of the Russian tanks are pure liquid awesome..  And it’s a Russian made game.. Hmmmm..

It’s telling when the biggest gun my American tier 6 heavy can fit is a 76mm gun that does an average damage of 115 points, and the Russian tier 6 heavy can fit a 152mm gun that does 700 points!!!!!!   I mean come on!  That’s not even subtle, it’s to the point of being silly.. (Note: this gun is often called the “derp gun” in game cause its just stupid..)

It may be completely realistic and historically accurate (American tanks during this period did very much suck..)but at some point “fun” has to step in and be the guide..  This isn’t a tank simulator and isn’t meant to be..

Pay-to-Win:  The other issue I fear for is the Free-to-play model that they are employing..  The economic model they have chosen to use is confusing and messy.  There are multiple types of money to be used, money you buy and money you earn. You can convert money you buy into money you earn but both are used to buy things.  Some objects in the store are purchased with the earned money, some with the purchased money.  Experience is the same way in that there is earned experience for a given thing, and free experience that you can use on anything.  You can of course convert experience on a given thing to free experience but it costs money that you purchase.. etc..

It’s confusing to a new player even though I understand it now it still boggles a little. I honestly don’t know why they didnt just go to one type of money, one type of experience.. Done.   And to boot the cost for the gold money that you buy is too high compared to what you get, as well as them gouging you to convert experience to free experience.. it’s almost like they see that as a cash cow and are trying like hell to get folks to fork over the $$$..

Plus now they have added things like special tanks and ammo that you can purchase, and while it’s kind of expensive it’s nearly twice as good as the free stuff..  So sure, it’s free to play but you’re extremely gimped if you don’t pony up the cash..  Paid (Premium) players get 50% more experience, access to WAY better ammo and tanks as well as gear and experienced crew..etc.. basically they have tried to monetize the game into a pay-to-win model where by the player who buys the most stuff will win every time.   Not cool.

Okay enough.. you get the idea.. And having said all that, I still like the game.. It’s still fun!  But I wonder how much of that is just due to a novelty value of getting to drive around in tanks and blow shit up..

I just don’t see how it’s going to hold peoples attention in the long run.  The issues are out weighing the fun slowly.  The line of sight issue is easily the biggest with people just popping into and out of existence.. they have to get that one fixed or this game will be DOA..

My biggest concern at this point is that I just don’t see how they are going to get all the issues fixed in time for their release at the beginning of next month.

Greed Corp

I have always liked turn based strategy games.. They used to be “the” game genre, but over the years as time and technology has marched forward they have largely started to decline in  favor of more real time strategy games and first person shooters.

So when W!Games introduced Greed Corp a modern turn based strategy game with a very clever land collapsing mechanic to the PC late last year, I was pretty excited..  This was the first I had heard of it even though the  PS3 and XBox players had access to it since last February.  I don’t follow the console games market at all so it was completely new to me.

I have to admit I really like it.. The best part about this game is that it’s actually a game.. Meaning it focuses on game play not wizbang special effects or graphics..  I really feel that this is a shining example of good game design and salute the W!Games folks.

Greed Corp screen

The fun of the game comes in the form of playing on the edge of a very delicate balancing act between harvesting resources to fuel your expansion and preserving that land to stay alive.   The games landmass is divided up into these hex tiles that you take control of in an attempt to control the whole map.  Each hex tile has a level associated with it and each time your harvester harvests it’s tile and the six around it, that level is lowered one.

If you lower it too far, it breaks up and falls away.  You can (and often do) intentionally crack up some key spots to  help direct the flow or to cause a cascade of tile collapses in order to win the game..  It’s a lot of fun and can be deceptively challenging..

It’s not your standard 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game like Masters of Orion or Civilization..   In that there is no exploration, you see the entire map from get go and know exactly what your opponents are doing all the time.   Nor does it have that rock/paper/scissors mechanic in it’s pieces where each piece has an advantage over some other piece, but a weakness to a third as so many modern games try to do..

To me this is one of those “chess” games..  You have a one primary game piece that has a very specific movement rule-set.  And you have a 3 possible placeable pieces (buildings) with no movement mechanic but affect the map or gameplay in some way.  That’s it.  Simple.  Elegant.

The rest of it is about playing your opponent by out maneuvering them with your few pieces..  It’s brilliant..

I give this game 4.5 out of 5.  The only reason it’s not a 5 is because the of the camera angle and zoom level.  I can’t help but feel the camera angle is too steep, and pine for the ability to zoom out a bit..  But other than that I can honestly say well done guys.. Great stuff.

Perpetuum Online

A while back I was trolling the intertoobs for a new game when I stumbled across Perpetuum Online;  A Hungarian borne MMO based in the distant future on a far away planet where the avatars are Mech based as are the mobs with a large skill based PVE and PVP system..  Booya!  It sounded great!

So when it came out the other day, I was one of the first to sign up.  And I have to say I’m having a good time with it, but I’m getting ahead of myself..

Now I want to give a fair description of the game, and I want to do my best to review it for its own merits, but its going to be really hard for me not to point out the similarities with Eve Online.

That is to say, its really similar in a lot of ways.. You could sum up a lot of the game by saying;  Eve Online has space ships..  Perpetuum Online has mechs..  And you’d get a pretty fair idea of how Perpetuum works.

But so far it doesn’t have some of the issues Eve has..

Firstly, the UI.   Eve Online has been notorious for having a dreadful user interface.  Everything is a right click and nesty in sub-menus which sucks, people have gone so far as to call it “right click online”..  They went more of a “windows” route in Perpetuum which I wholey support.  Each tool you open, opens in its own viewlet within the interface that you can move and customize as you see fit.  My only complaint is that they probably should have had a bunch of defaults for the windows when opened and they should better track previous locations when opened..etc..  As it stands now all newly opened windows tend to tile, or open center screen..  Minor complaints and things that will likely come out in the wash over time.

Eve's Learning Curve

Secondly and quite possibly the most important difference is that they have simplified the game in some ways.  It doesn’t seem to have that death steep learning curve that Eve Online has..  Plus, Perpetuum has a fairly robust help system and the help channel is actually helpful as opposed to constant spam and nonstop egregious asshatery that you often find in the Eve help channel.

I also really like the fact that they are paying more attention to the PVE aspect of the game.  Eve online had some meager PVE grafted on but it was horrible, boring and kinda pointless.  You could grind faction in Eve but it really served little to no purpose..  In Perpetuum there is a much larger PVE element to the game, and faction means something.  I hope they go so far as to add PVE bosses ala some of the fantasy games out there.  I like that there is PVP, but all PVP all the time is made of fail.

Something else that appeals to me is that this game is being developed by a very small group of folks by an independant developer and I want them to succeed.  The dev team is a group of like 5 guys in their garage.. Okay it may be a few more and they probably aren’t stuck in a garage, but you get the idea.. Something appeals to me about a small independent team as opposed to a huge corporate group with $$$$ as their only goal.. (that’s not to say that a small group isn’t also concerned about profits, but they usually are more open to game changing things..)

There are a lot of things that still need to be done and the devs are fully aware of that.  But it’s a damn good start..

I really like that I am coming to in fresh from the very beginning and can expand as the game expands.  I wonder what the game will be like in a year when new players show up and everyone else out classes the new player 10 fold.

In Eve that was a bit of a problem, but was solved by making small new player ships still somewhat competitive against the bigger ships so you could still play and not be completely out matched.   Since there are nothing but small ships in Perpetuum as of yet, I am hoping they took this approach too.  It would be bad if after a year new players show up and just repreatedly trounced..  There is no velocity or angle of attack defenses in Perpetuum, so a small bot can’t “speed tank” a big one.. Not sure how they will handle that..

Also right now the economy is completely broken.. Prices are out of whack and I’m making money faster than should be possible, but thats because I’m exploiting the market while it stabilizes..   This same thing happened at the beginning of Eve..  But as an old Eve player I understand how the market works and can make the best of it.. heh.. yay me..

All in all its a good game.. its fun.. it’s an open world sandbox that allows you to do whatever you want ala’ Eve Online, but with mechs..  How cool is that?

Black-Ops

I really do enjoy the Call of Duty franchise..  It started out as a PC shooter back in 2003 and was pretty much heralded as the game to be or beat..  They continued with expansion after expansion and broadened their horizons to other machines.   At this point the franchise spans something like 15 to 20 titles on 5 or 6 different platforms earning more than $3 billion dollars world wide, and even includes it’s own line of action figures..    However their latest offering is down right bad and they should hang their head a little..

More over, for a game that started on the PC one would think they would give it more love than they do.. At this point the PC version of the latest game is completely unplayable by a large portion of the market, myself included and some how that seems okay to them.

It really seems the zero day patch system that just about all software manufacturers use is starting to get out of hand..  Whats that you ask?   Well it goes something like this;  Marketing and business have the game release date firmly set because that’s what they have promised share holders.    This is a firm date and it can’t move.   Period.

Product architects and management continue to shoe-horn in last minute features that they think would be cool or because users want them or because they fit some “vision”, and expect that date they set above to not slip at all..    So it’s up to the developers to squeeze out the product in a completely unreasonable amount of time..

Prior to that magical date, there is another magical date when the product goes gold.. At gold (or dcut or whatever they call it) they cut a copy of the program and send it to test.  If it passes the most basic of verification tests they go on and send it to print where it gets put to disks and / or packaged up to be shipped to the user.

Test continues to file defects and report problems to the developers and the developers are still working to fix those bugs..  But everyone knows that the software is full of bugs when it first goes gold and gets shipped to the customer..  Management and Marketing accepts this as “how it is”, and usually fails to tell the shareholders it works this way..  So they are fully aware of how broken the product is, in order to meet that magical ship date..

They are just hoping like hell that once the game is installed it will automatically download the latest patch (the zero day patch) which will fix all the bugs that the game shipped with..

But that begs the question;  What happens when you willingly and knowingly ship a broken product hoping for that zero day patch, but that zero day patch isn’t ready in time?  Or the zero day patch doesn’t do anything to address the issues people are seeing?

This is whats going on with black ops..  There was a zero day patch (shocker) and it didn’t do anything that I can tell, or at the very best brought it from a completely broken state to now just an unreasonably broken state for a game we paid $60 in order to play..

The real pisser is that companies know that we have zero recourse..  We have no way to get that money back..  I paid for a game, and it doesn’t work.. and I have no recourse..   Imagine if you purchased a toaster from walmart and it just didn’t do anything.. you could take it back, and have a reasonable expectation of getting your money back.   Not here;  And they know it..  They bank on it..

Bottom line is the game is broken for a large number of folks and they don’t care.. One of the devs via his twitter account stated as much..  Instead talking about the 85k people playing right at that moment..

As of Nov 2009 the call of duty franchise sold more than 55 million units, and they think just because a paltry 85k can play the game it’s okay?   Plus they have no idea how well those 85k are able to play.. I can play the game for a few minutes here and there, but it crashes or lags to a stop..etc.. Sure I was playing it but it wasn’t playable.. Am I one of those 85k they are so proud of?

Single player gets laggy and stuttery while playing it but usually it’s still somewhat playable, frustrating as hell, but playable.. where as multiplayer is so bad it’s completely not worth trying to play..

I was able to get the game to play once I turned all graphics to the minimum settings, lowered the screen resolution to something ridiculously low, and played it in a window..  THEN it’s “playable” (I use the term loosely)..  My CPU is still hammered though..  My GPU is bored when I do this.. It almost acts like they aren’t using GPU acceleration maybe?   I really don’t know..

The game is unreasonably broken..  It’s 100% CPU bound in that they did virtually zero optimization on the code or left the debug code going or aren’t using GPU acceleration or something..  My quad core pegs all 4 cores to 100% while playing and my machine while older is no slouch..

It often loses save games just out of the blue.. I got half way through the game, went to get something to eat.. came back to continue after having continued before only to have a “New Campaign” option.. My resume game options were all gone..  So great.. I got half way through to have to go half way through again?!  Fuck that..  This is the point when I started to fight with multiplayer..

The servers list is completely broken in multiplayer in that it often doesn’t update.. or refuses to stop updating once it starts.. or you can’t connect to a server at all.. or it doesn’t even try to connect..

Once connected it stutters to a stop constantly.. Not network lag either this is an internal lockup of some sort.. My ping usually doesn’t go above 50..  DirectX crashes, random crashes to desktop, jerky stuttery video.. etc..  It’s just unplayable and not fun..

It’s also pretty clear to me that even though they list a minimum spec computer that can run the game, they never actually tried that themselves as a lot of folks on the forums who don’t have the latest Intel i7 QuadCore Super Rig simply can’t play it..

Ultimately, I’m severely disappointed..  I really expected a hell of a lot more out of them..

I can play COD:World at War on max graphics using my one graphics card to span 3 monitors and it works fine.. Yet this game wont work at all on the same PC?   It’s not my machine..

And by their responses, I guess COD is no longer the franchise for me..  I can’t recommend this game at all.. It gets zero stars and isn’t worth your money, your time, or your frustration..

EDIT:  Okay so on a whim I completely reinstalled windows from the ground up the same day that they released a new patch for the game..  Now the game is playable..  I can’t actually say if it was due to the windows reinstall, the patch or both..

I have been playing a lot of multiplayer and I can say its not bad but still has a lot of issues which makes me think the original issue was the game not my machine..  I still get a lot of stuttering with the game as well as the crashes..  The server list is still completely borked, and server hangups/crashes seem constant too which tells me the game still needs more patching before it’s good to go..

I’d still recommend waiting..

FU Again er 2...

I never played the first Force Unleashed game and I sorta regretted it as I knew several folks who said it was a pretty good game..  So I was really excited when they announced a Force Unleashed 2 for the PC.    I figured that I’d finally get to try what everyone was talking about..

Well I’ve tried it..  What a piece of shit..  This is quite honestly the first game that has pissed me off in a long time..  And I mean absolutely barking at the computer, pissed off..

So lets give the pros;

It’s beautiful..  The graphics engine that they have used is a very nice one and it does a really good job of immersing you into the Star Wars universe..

Plus it’s a console to PC port so the expected controls are pretty bad, but I have seen worse console ports in this department so I want to give them a thumbs up here.. Not great.. Certainly not as good as a native PC game, but not terribad.

Now lets talk about the cons;

The camera system.  The gameplay.. The gameplay and uh.. the gameplay!!

First lets talk about the camera system..   Whoever the asshat was that thought it was a good idea to decouple the camera system from the players perspective and force you to control the character from whatever fucked up camera angle they wanted to throw at you for any given instance, needs to be kicked in the balls while being garroted by a hairy sweaty man using a live eel..  And then shot.

The camera system makes this game nearly unplayable as you don’t look in the direction you’re going!!  No no you look in whatever direction either your mouse was looking at previously OR (and this is by far worse) whatever fixed camera position they want you in for that particular scene..

It makes controlling your character impossible.  This is something that does NOT translate well from a console game to a PC game.  It only serves to piss people off,  so stop it!

But that’s not the worst part.  No no.

The worst part is the game play in which they decide every few minutes to throw a quicktime event at you..  For those of you that are unfamiliar with quick time events they go something like this.. PUSH E NOW!   Oh too late… You died.. Start over.

The next time it will be some other random control you have to do at exactly the right or you fail it!   Plus, the correct control request is displayed at various spots around the screen instead of in the same place..  So you never know whats coming, when.. or for how long..etc..

This shit made for crappy game play 20 years ago in Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, and it makes for crappy game play today..  It’s cheap and easy for the programmers so that’s why they do it.. Not because it’s fun.. I can’t understand how console gamers like this crap but clearly they do or they wouldn’t do it..

Now.. Combine those two issues and you begin to understand why I had to stop playing every few minutes to wipe the projectile scream-spittle off my monitor..

You can’t see where you’re going or what you’re doing because you’re stuck in their camera angle and you have to perform some bullshit quick time event that borders on the impossible..

I got to the Gorgon scene (or whatever the big god of war style beasty is in the arena is called), tried it about 20 times and uninstalled the game.    It pissed me off bad enough trying to lock his arms in to the shackles but really pissed me off the next part where they throw an awkward camera angle at you followed by a fucked up quick time event and don’t explain at all what you’re supposed to do..

Done.

This game is shit.  Lucas Arts should hang their head as it does nothing to foster good memories about the franchise, it’s a painful game that isn’t fun what so ever..

I’ll give it 1 star for being pretty and half a star for actually not doing a bad job converting the controls to PC.. but the gameplay and camera system sink it completely.